Well, the problem of people keying over each other on CB would need a capacity increase. Of course, that means channels, and that means we can't all ask about where the Smokeys are at once. Which is insolvable with CB technology. Truckers need to be posting to a Wiki for local reports. Ah, an idea! I can make money with this! BAHAHA!
Seriously, though, if everyone had a CB when Katrina hit NO, the reports would be "Traffic is hopelessly snarled, you can't get out, you should have left two days ago, get to high ground NOW!" And most of NO would still be waiting for the bus.
CB is fascinating. I toyed with it back then. But the Internet is different. It allows for multiple conversations, and the 'channels' (blogs, IM, email whatever analogy you pick) are more robust than anything a radio can do unless you turn it into a data device. Then you've got the Internet on CB.
We already got an Internet. Use it.
Now how do I provide Smokey reports off a WAP site? Lemme see...
Cuil looks like it wants to serve up results where relevance is a random concept. I searched on my domain name. Surprise! I got hits for posts I made to various forums in *2001*. Nice. And a 404 for the 11th result, from a.de site. Very nice. Not one of the first page of results pointed to the domain website; for instance, searched for somedomain.net, no hits pointing to www.somedomain.net... Pus. No, I don't want to use my real domain name and get./'d. The fire alarms in the rack would go off in about 4 minutes... Why wake up the neighbors for no good reason?
Cuil also tends to return results for aggregators, giving you pages of results for link farms, advice/funnel sites, and the usually 'helpful shopping sites' I dread.
It's clearly not finished yet. But not a bad strategy to first learn to crawl, then to search, and then to organize. I hope they don't run out of money before they get it right, or sell out to something evil, like Apple. Google needs competition. They are now doing evil, like it or not, along with the good. Only a matter time before the 'Google searches YOU!' headlines lead to losing any semblance of privacy or accuracy in your searches. In time, it will be search for cash. You search, they cash in.
I wandered Times Square any hour of the day or night in the 70s. Not too dangerous, but then again I was just visiting the City. It was educational at first, then it became a ritual. Then I realized it was wierd. Crap. Another fun idea ruined.
Sounds like Phoenix. Nice place, mostly, but you can get shot or stabbed for driving a red Dodge pickup, or stopping at a red light, or just looking at another driver. And of course you can't leave much in your car when parking it. Heck, I think you have to be careful if you're driving slow enough to be caught on foot.
Your local meth head agrees. Much easier to steal the add-on unit dangling by suction cups and power cord than to hack away at the dash, and whatchagot, the shards of a Lexus GPs that no one wants...
Perhaps we can get a Taser wired up to the car, so when you break the glass you get a little bonus by touching anything in or on the car. Of course, then, the market for replacement power cords dries up.
There's no way to avoid hurting someone in this, is there...
My wife's '98 Saab 900 has a fuel gauge that is pretty accurate, down to the last few miles of travel. The OBD stuff calculates distance to empty, and I've had it down to 9 miles to empty on flat road. Accelerating then was touchy, it seems the little bit left was sloshing away from the pickup, or the pump could no longer satisfy the demand, but that's damned good.
It's also great fun to watch the DTE drop when I blow the doors off wannabees at traffic lights, or on the freeway ramp. Saab nailed turbos a long time ago, boyz. Go back to the rice shop and see if you can't get a K20 into that... And from the looks of your hood and clip, you might want to work on the brakes. Right after you top off the oil. Sheesh. Ditto for the Mustangs - a slushbox is not the way to go, even if I do have to grind second through the mangled syncros. It's more fun right now to take care, do the limit, and watch the DTE climb on the highway... I'm getting 29.5MPG with the A/C set to Phoenix Summer Mode. 32MPG without the A/C.
Now, my '95 Explorer, that gauge is pus, but I understand it. without A/C, it goes 99 miles until the needle comes off 'F'. Then it's 150 mi to 3/4, 200 mi to 1/2, 250 mi to 1/4, and 'E' gets hit about 300-320 mi, depending on the commute and my patience. My wife rarely sees 280mi on a tank. And when it dips below 'E', I can get 19 gal. into it. The tank is rated 22gal. give or take. I've never been able to get 20 gals. into it even bone dry and a gallon from the AAA guy to get me to a station. I think of the gauge in the Explorer as a trend indicator. My Taurus before that was pretty much the same, and the earlier Taurus was dangerously out of gas when the needle got near the 'E'. I had an old Datsun 310 that would drop from 3/4 to 1/4 in 20 miles. Fun when you're up in the Maine woods and the nearest station is 40 miles away... Whatta POS that car was.
Just from experience, wouldn't it be a wonderful world with bug-free firmware? Sadly, when I was having lunch with software 'engineers', it was enlightening to listen to them share their latest bug fixes. For stuff I never thought would have a bug. Hubs, switches, routers, oh my... So it's not possible that even a CD player might be shipped with a defect? Of course not, and certainly there could never be any combination of data on a Red Book CD that would result in difficulty for the occasional bug... Naw. Can't be. Now, badly mastered CDs were pretty common at the beginning, like some early DVDs. Most of the complaints were more on the order of program quality, things like noise floor, hearing the brass section re-enter and close the stage door, things you might never hear on analog recordings.
And I'm not referring to physical defects. Different problems.
I'm also not equaing CDs and MDs. I know the difference, and MD have different issues being lossy. Just don't get me started on MD and MP3. My MD player is still head and shoulders better quality than any MP3 I've heard. It just is.
But I did refer a little to the differences in CD players - not really elaborating on DACs. I remember when Burr-Brown was the be-all/end-all of DACs, and the whole BBD thing. I got into BBDs for pitch-shifting. A few players were mass-produced with sockets for the DACs, letting the brand choose something different, usually for S/N ratio.
And then, after all this, you've got people (http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/eac/eac_2.html) who think there is variability in CDs, bringing out jitter, physical mastering issues, and their own software techniques to decode a CD. What, there's more than one way???
Eh. ps.. the AK-DL1 isn't an Ethernet cable. It's a Denon Link cable. Digital audio. Still massively overpriced for me, but it's not Ethernet. Think Monster Cable. Overpriced, but not always average quality. Just overpriced.
Have the corporate lawyers tell you what you need to save. That's the simple part for you
Save it. Not so easy, often, but there are plenty of tools. I'm not paid by anybody to market them to you.
If you're with a business that has clear legal needs to save electronic correspondence, I'm surprised you haven't already been getting the sales pitch. Or maybe your executive team has been.
Again, the claim that CD software is always going to decode the data flawlessly is yet to be proven. It should, but again some makers would cheat as much as possible on the processor, RAM, whatever to get the unit out the door for a profit. This is MUCH less common nowadays, since the hardware is pretty cheap, and processors are vastly better than back in the late 80s. My first player was a Sony, and it was fine. The next, a Denon, was not my friend, though most of the problems were with the UI.
I'm going to have to look harder for the problem passages I worked with back around 1992. We were discussing it on minidisc.org, but I can't find the emails yet. Another archive I have to get and load.
Yes, I have emails from 1990 and before. Don't ask. I have spam samples from then to about 2004, when spam stopped being cool and started being nasty.
You know, your $30 player might indeed play these back just fine. But you're not that familiar with decoding CDs, methinks.
First, consider the various types of decoders; 1-bit vs parallel for instance. If your player is marginally designed, perhaps it has a hard time asctually delivering maximum slew rate. The passages I have been able to find that challenge players usually have either aun unsually wide dynamic range or significant power in a wide bandwidth. I'm ignoring CD defects, since error correction isn't the issue I'm referring to. The reality is that each maker of CD mechanisms has to write or buy firmware to do the decoding, manage the hardware, and provide a UI. There isn't one standard fimware out there. Some just might not handle a specific set of data quite the way another did, and some doesn't at all.
This distinct from the problems of jitter, for instance, that plague most players.
Of course, as noted elsewhere in this thread, poor mastering (encoding) can cause problems for players. This is pretty rampant in DVDs, where poor mastering can lead to unusable discs for certain players. It may be the player's software, but who cares... I have been told that most DVD mastering problems are in the past. We'll see.
Last, however, but not least, consider the various CD players for PCs. No monolithic playback software here - much variety, and much variety in perceived quality also. No self-respecting audiophile will use a PC to play back CDs for critical listening - too many variables, and then you get to the software. I'm aware of only one motherboard that claimed decent audio output from the onboard set, and that was an Acer with a tube preamp, the AX4B-533. Cute, but it didn't really impress me.
Actually, when you put it that way, HDTV resolution, after compression, 1080 isn't really 1080 is it? If your point is that we should expect that a given resolution won't necessarily be what it is, then I'm in agreement. Do we get even what they say we get? .
"HD stations often have wildly varying levels of picture quality that change from one moment to the next"
Huh? You mean Stargate Atlantis is being broadcast on changing resolutions in midstream?
No, not exactly, I bet.
I've seen pleny of my best friend's 52" LCD, and HD can be very very nice. DiscoveryHD is probably the best on a consistent basis, and he uses DirecTV. But the problems are multiple and frustrating. Typical programming, for instance:
A 720i or 1080i program looks pretty good. Then it goes to commercial, which is probably 480i. Pillarboxing ensues. Icky, but at least the aspec ratio is accurate. I see a lot of this on ABC network programming - especially sports, when they do studio shots of the taking heads. Sometimes the local ad slot goes out in SD, and looks pretty crappy. But hey, some affiliates are actually incompetent, or are carrying ads that were not rescanned - you know, used car lots can be cheap advertisers.
Sometimes, you see something in HD that is fairly sharp, like a recent movie that is upconverted. Then you get a dark, still scene. The background degenerates into a flat matte. When the characters move, you see a few artifacts and blocking. Woopsie, somebody doesn't have enough TV for this. I've seen the same DVD scene on three TVs, and made note of the scene change. On the 52" Sony LCD Proj set, it blocked a bit, consistently. On the Sharp Aquos 37" LCD, no blocking. On the 13" SDTV, the DVD player fritzed out and blacked for about 5 frames I think. On my. Those terrible artifacts may not be the signal. Your set may have a hard time decoding and displaying some uniquely challenging data. This is not new - I have a CD of a symphony that has a passage that is rarely decoded cleanly by any player but the very best. Not the mostg expensive, but the best. And I have another that cannot be played back cleanly by my MiniDisc player/recorder - it has a clearly heard problem with the program material. This should be a rare occurence, even unique to 2 or 3 incidents in your entire collection. But it isn't that unique with HDTV. Sometimes the motion-control stuff or enhancements just don't do very well. I'm not complaining much though.
The "picture quality that change(s) from one moment to the next" complaint is probably more like the pictue quality is in fact changing, cause we have differing program sources. In NTSC, this was evident in the difference between a movie scan, direct-to-tape programming (many soaps are like this), and live (the Today Show, for instance). It didn;t matter much, just cause nothing really looked so much better or worse in NTSC. Of course, those old commercials on U-Matic sure looked awful, but then they got enhanced just as HD got started up. Ick.
My biggest complaint is 'digital TV'. Like digital cable. Pus. So compressed, the solarizaiton is off the scale. MPEG compression making the field in a soccer game into a flat green painting. Whip pans end up smaearing everything. The ball gets lost if it and the camera are moving wrong. Movies like the Batman series, that are dark, become shades of brown, indecipherable. I haven't see Fahrenheit 451, but I wonder how that looks. Some of the white scenes must be precious indeed.
Then there's the whole SD-stretching thing. I loathe this. When even Callista Flockhart looks a little pudgy, you know that stretching SD to fill the screen is really wrong. But most everyone configures their HDTV to do this. So it looks like crap, so what? I paid for that screen, and I'm gonna use all of it.
We are on the verge of seeing Televison move to the Internet. Your TV will have enough horsepower to decode most anything, and new codecs will be coming fast and furious. FIOS and YouTube melded into ipTV, and sold by the minute if they can figure out how. Or blended with ads that can't be skipped or ignored. Recording flag? Not necessary. A simple DRM scheme makes it impossible to divert the stream to a capture device. Unless, of course, an op
"Can you imagine if we we still had to pay royalties to whatever company bought the rights to Shakespeare's estate every time a school drama club wanted to put on Hamlet?"
I wonder. Where do you go to get a script for Hamlet? Wikipedia? Oh, darn, it might, just MIGHT not be accurate.
Or maybe the library. You'll need at least three copies of it, I suspect, to rehearse with. Off to the Xerox...
Actually, the best example of not making a lot of sense to the quick-to-leap, but in the end making some good sense, is the issue of buying sheet music for some of the classic symphonies, say Beethoven's Fifth. Yes, you can still buy it, you are prohibited by copyright from duplicating the music you purchase, and the companies that produce said sheet music do a good business. Why?
Accuracy, allegedly. While Beethoven wrote his symphony a while ago, and is long dead (him, not the music), he did not write an arrangement for every conceivable orchestral configuration. Not even for guitar. So if you want a score, from which to play, you need to find one arranged to your needs, say one without oboe or perhaps for just piano, i dunno.
There are companies out there that do this. Produce scores based on their concept of the original, changes as necessary to accomodate performance or perhaps just current taste, I dunno that either. But they do, and they copyright their expression of the Fifth. And other works as well, I betcha.
Is it copyrightable? Sure. It's your work. Beethoven can't complain any more, and his estate is too far gone.
But we want to hear his music, and that means having a score for it to be played from. And someone has to print that score, in form useful for orchestra, etc. This is good, and probably copyrightable, since if I wanted to publish scores of the Fifth, I would have to go to some effort to find the original score (probably pay the owner for the opportunity to study it and copy it...), arrange it for current prchestra, maintain it, produce copies, so forth. Am I entitled to some compensation for this? Yes. and if so, am I entitled to some protection from others that merely copy my work without any additional effort? I think so.
I know this will rankle some of you, but indeed, merely copying someone's work is pretty cheap. Doing it to avoid the cost of paying them for it is cheap too. Doing it to profit by their effort is theft. Copyright laws don't determine that, they recognize and punish the theft. If you add value somehow, you can make your case that your derivitave work deserves protection also. And then you can compete.
Just my 2cents. After asking my wife how much it cost to purchase performance rights for a Broadway play, I got interested in this. Turns out, there's no such thing as free theatre, if you want the original script.
"In this particular case, he might've saved the city of San Francisco millions of dollars in lost productivity from someone getting access who had no clue what they were doing."
I've worked with this type before. Damn, I've *BEEN* this type before.
Maybe, maybe not. Sounds like this admin was convinced that the rest of the crew were dangerous idiots. Maybe he's unusually paranoid. I vote for paranoid. Just as dangerous as being right, for different reasons. Imagine serious problems occurring while he is in jail. His propable response might be "See? You need to let me out of here so I can fix this and prevent disaster". Suuuuure... I imagine the authorities will swing the door open and let him out to 'fix' things.
If for no other reason, this poor admin is incompetent in a novel, or NOT novel way. He has no competent backup. A kidney stone, myocardial infarct, or even a knee replacement would leave him out of commission, and SF exposed to loss of network. Sheesh. You back up data, you should back up staff as well, wherever possible, and this is clearly in the realm of 'possible'. Even 'essential'.
Of course, the funniest part of this to me is where he claims he can only trust Gavin Newsome. That's F-U-N-N-Y!
It seems as if the most difficult problem with this story is to stick to the facts.
For instance, a quick look here:http://www.aim.org/special-report/myths-memos-and-dan-rather-a-nation-remembers/ gives up a list of purported facts and statements. Feel free to dispute any of them. I'll be watching for your replies.
If Dan Rather trusted his production staff, writers, reporters, fact-checkers, and editors, then he can only be excused for having been fooled. But being willing to be fooled by an attractive story makes you a willing fool. When I first heard about this story, way back then, I was disappointed - my favored candidate seemed to have some not very nice incidents in his past, and I worried that he would end up being shown as an opportunist, taking advantage of every chance to enrich himself at the expense of others, and avoiding risk wherever possible. I'm speaking obout GWBush, in case you were confused. Then, as I read more and waited for more facts to appear, I began to realize that his opponents were attempting to take another insignificant issue and turn it into something it wasn't. I felt a little better. Of course, the stories of Senator Kerry's Vietnam exploits left with the same impression, which didn't get better as more facts came out.
The Niger story is really becoming an interesting item to me now, of all times, because it is becoming apparent, to any who care to examine the current facts, that there was and is a rational basis for the belief that Saddam Hussein would have been looking for sources of yellowcake uranium. He already had substantial supplies of it, and was preparing facilities to enrich it into useable fissionable material. Looking for more would not be illogical. We just spirited out a fair amount of yellowcake, sold to a Canadian firm, only this month. We can argue about whether or not Saddam actually did contact Niger or any other supplier, but let's not be disingenuous and pretend it wasn't possible, ok? And remember, this issue had fooled the CIA, Most of the US military, the NSA, and British and French intelligence agencies, along with others. I've come to the belief that in the case against Saddam, the Administration was willing to believe the worst, on the flimsiest evidence. Not the first time that has happened.
Back to these memos, though, CBS and Dan Rather didn't have to ride that horse into the ground. They could have let the whole thing boil dry with 'we'll never know for sure' comments, and made the poitns they could. Instead, Rather would not let go. His bad judgement.
And consider the source of the copies. Unfortunate.
One of those things we may never be sure about, though I'm fairly well convinced. No, not to the point of it being impossible, but beyond reasonable doubt.
And then there's the issue of what was being accused through the use of these memos. I find the attempt to demean our President's military service to lack credibility. Enough.
Oh, I know about the Model D Executive - I referenced it several times in my post.
To change a character on the Executive, you would have to either replace a typebar, or solder on a new slug. Neither trivial.
And typefaces similar to what was shown on the copies of the memos would nto have been MS Times New Roman. A better choice would be Courier New. I found an excellent list of fonts for the Selectric Composer on this http://www.ibmcomposer.org/docs/Selectric%20Composer%20Operations%20Manual.pdf site, what a great manual! Not good matches for MS fonts there, but if I were trying to fake a typewriter in Windows after v3.1 or 3.11, I would find many good fonts to choose from. Go have a look. Many choices. If you are willing to use a Macintosh, so much easier, as ATM fonts have several typewriter-identical options, if I recall. Bodoni was pretty common back then. No problem faking a typeface on a computer. Even easier if you use something like a CPT, Genesis, or maybe OS/6 word processor, though having the originals would end the speculation.
I really doubt the Colonel had an Executive. Despite IBM's marketing-speak, Execs were not very common outside of the Fortune 100 at that time, or in certain specific industries. Having an Exec would not enhance routine correspondence for an ANG unit, and the first servidce agreement or repair invoice would get it tossed in a closet and something more affordable brought out to replace it. We charged 3-4 times Selectric costs for all proportional space machines, and more for the Selectric Composer. GSA permitted that.
Sadly, I am not yet convinced these documents are genuine. I can't say it's impossible that they are.
I'm a former typewriter technician from 'those days'. You are ignoring some significant information.
Back 'then', and up to about 1990, typewriters were, as you pointed out, capable of printing fonts other than Courier and Prestige Elite. Such machines were somewhat rare, the most common alternative being Orator from IBM.
More significant, however were two features of 'those' documents: Proportional spacing and text centering. These capabilities were significantly less common, and centering is not a typewriter feature - it is an operator's skill.
Looking at one of the documents here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Guardgif.gif, you can see in the first paragraph the word 'Ellington'. It appears to me that the 'i' is properly spaced for proportional type. This limits the available typeariters at that time to pretyt much the IBM Executive or IBM Composer, neither of which were common, and both would have been uncommon on GSA purchasing. It's possible that the Lt. Colonel who is shown as the author could have a clerk using one of these, but very unlikely.
More interesting, the unit designation in the second paragraph, 111th F.L.S., has the superscripted 'th'. I don't think this was common on even the Composer, but maybe the Excecutive would have had that character. So this document was probably typed on an IBM Excecutive machine?
It doesn't seem likely that this was typed on any Selectric machine. There are characteristics that pretyt much leave out a Selectrtic as the source.
This picture of the document is pretty much inadequate for more serious analysis, sadly. It's been thorugh too many duplications, and many characteristics of the type are lost and useless for further investigation. Looking at the 'r's in the document, some are missing serifs. The word 'MEMORANDUM' has the 'R' dropped significantly, where further on the line the word 'FOR' is fairly well aligned. This is not easy to do on a typewriter, but then again the quality of the picture makes it nearly impossible to do a better analysis.
When I first saw these documents, I was astonished. These were not typed.
Oh, and the centering? On a proportional space machine, this is not a trivial operation. You need to space characters using 1,3,4, or 5 sub-spaces, and I forget the technical term for this level of escapment. A fair amount of training, and practice, are necessary. Maybe the clerk for a Pentagon commander has this skill, but not likely the clerk for a Texas ANG officer.
Nice try, but this was a fake. Though I'd LOVE to see the originals. The ink and impressions would answer a lot of questions. Copies fail these tests.
Give it up. Rather was fooled, and willingly so.
Let's ban all-electronic balloting so WE won't get fooled again, k?
ps- you wrote "The claims that the documents were fake, were based on the incorrect belief that typewriters could not produce superscript "st" and "nd"". Name me four. Hint, one I mentioned above. Second hint, ignore Adler typewriters, none used in GSA back then. Third hint, ignore Smith-Corona, Facit, Underwood, they dndn't make that sort of machine. Fourth hint, stick to IBM, Olympia, Royal. NOt so sure about Royal. You don't know typewriters.
Harrr... I *still* adminster a Wildcat!BBS. Just don't ask, ok? It's necessary...
But WfW, wow it was a lot of OS. I ran it with Trumpet Winsock and hit AOL over my lame ISP's 56k DDS2 uplink to a 'real' ISP that had an MCI T-1. AOL of IP, beat the crap out of long-distance phone bills. How much obosolete stuff did I just mention...
But WfW was fair, and I only had to reboot every 4 hours of surfing or so. Only every 10th or so print job would turn into garbage and require a reboot to flush the spooler correctly.
Then I bought Windows 95, Upgrade version.
Ran it 29 days straight. No reboots. Woot!
And the first service pack was downloaded. Never ran more than a week at a time after that. Win98 was pretty much the same, I could get it to go a month if I didn't use it much.
Got a cable modem about the time I put Win2k to work at home. This was n-i-c-e. Went 2 months or so without a reboot, and it was testing my home Novell server as well as surfing as hard as I could. And ftp-ing, IRC, Usenet, the works.
It took about 3 years for XP to be as stable as 2000 for me.
Damn, the good old days. They really did suck, didn't they?
As if it's about helping people get off welfare. Keeping them off welfare would be the right strategy, by:
Ensuring citizens and legal residents get a crack at jobs, no matter the pay. Oh, and watch the pay increase when employers can't rely on indentured servitude to fill their positions. No one in Washington seems to want to tackle this, and damned few states either. Alternatively, be honest and just abandon immigration laws. Not enforcing the law leads to contempt by both the criminal and the honest citizen.
Ending abuse of visa programs. Plenty of actual citizens (and legal residents too) are looking for IT jobs. The H1B program is a disgrace, and needs either reform or abolition. Maybe both. Sorry, but H1Bs are a scam, Bill G. Nice try.
Stop throwing US industry under the bus via most-favored-nation-status gimmes, near total lack of tarriffs on subsidised imports, and tax/economic policies that encourage offshoring everything from shoemakers to CEOs. This in particular is not a new problem, but goes back to the 70s easily.
Just three ideas that might make it possible for Americans to earn a livable wage and never have to be helped off of welfare.
ps- maybe we get more science majors out of this? Another idea that's getting some traction - a New GI Bill. Where do you suppose so many of those NASA engineers, technicians, and scientists came from during the 60s? Wouldn't hurt our troops to come home and have options, either.
It's not about the motors, Sparky. It's about the fuel.
Electric fuel is still difficult for cars. Petrol is so easy, just a tank and some plumbing. Electicity is somewhat more difficult to store, carry, and dispense. Not more or less dangerous, per se, just a technology we haven't bothered to develop much.
And it can be solved. We just have to decide where to make the electricity. Onboard, say fuel cells? Centrally, and where do we plug in to get a refill?
As an example of how much fun it is to make an electric car, I looked something up. Current Prius batteries are rated at 6.5Ah. The Apollo Lunar Module batteries were rated at 2.18Ah total. So the LM had about 1/3 the capacity of a Prius. Of course, a Prius can recharge the batteris with the onboard gas motor/generator, and regenerative braking. But an example of how far we haven't come in battery technology. The LEM didn't carry much weight, but packed a 1/3 of a Prius in capacity. I suspect if we apply ourselves, we can do better with batteries.
And the answer may not be batteries - capacitors might be better. I wonder how big a cap would have to be to equal the Prius battery pack... 20-30F? That would be fun! I've seen what a 2F/15000V cap does to a radar shack. Sweeeet....
Oh, and if 6.5Ah doesn't sound like much, it didn't to me either. The pack runs at 273V approx.
I'm tellin' ya, those guys down to DHS are funnier than a rubber crutch. Really, they come up with some whoppers. Imagine, a shock bracelet. Like I can type with that thing on. Or go to the bathroom. What happens if I spill my $2 Coke on it?
Seriously, proof once again that Jay Leno has the easiest job in all of the world. Made so because, clearly, he has the entire US federal government working for him, generating mountains of good stuff for his writers to merely sort and index.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the problem of people keying over each other on CB would need a capacity increase. Of course, that means channels, and that means we can't all ask about where the Smokeys are at once. Which is insolvable with CB technology. Truckers need to be posting to a Wiki for local reports. Ah, an idea! I can make money with this! BAHAHA!
Seriously, though, if everyone had a CB when Katrina hit NO, the reports would be "Traffic is hopelessly snarled, you can't get out, you should have left two days ago, get to high ground NOW!" And most of NO would still be waiting for the bus.
CB is fascinating. I toyed with it back then. But the Internet is different. It allows for multiple conversations, and the 'channels' (blogs, IM, email whatever analogy you pick) are more robust than anything a radio can do unless you turn it into a data device. Then you've got the Internet on CB.
We already got an Internet. Use it.
Now how do I provide Smokey reports off a WAP site? Lemme see...
It needs more than work. It needs a conscience.
Cuil looks like it wants to serve up results where relevance is a random concept. I searched on my domain name. Surprise! I got hits for posts I made to various forums in *2001*. Nice. And a 404 for the 11th result, from a .de site. Very nice. Not one of the first page of results pointed to the domain website; for instance, searched for somedomain.net, no hits pointing to www.somedomain.net... Pus. No, I don't want to use my real domain name and get ./'d. The fire alarms in the rack would go off in about 4 minutes... Why wake up the neighbors for no good reason?
Cuil also tends to return results for aggregators, giving you pages of results for link farms, advice/funnel sites, and the usually 'helpful shopping sites' I dread.
It's clearly not finished yet. But not a bad strategy to first learn to crawl, then to search, and then to organize. I hope they don't run out of money before they get it right, or sell out to something evil, like Apple. Google needs competition. They are now doing evil, like it or not, along with the good. Only a matter time before the 'Google searches YOU!' headlines lead to losing any semblance of privacy or accuracy in your searches. In time, it will be search for cash. You search, they cash in.
Wait. Already happening. Nevermind. We've lost.
I wandered Times Square any hour of the day or night in the 70s. Not too dangerous, but then again I was just visiting the City. It was educational at first, then it became a ritual. Then I realized it was wierd. Crap. Another fun idea ruined.
Sounds like Phoenix. Nice place, mostly, but you can get shot or stabbed for driving a red Dodge pickup, or stopping at a red light, or just looking at another driver. And of course you can't leave much in your car when parking it. Heck, I think you have to be careful if you're driving slow enough to be caught on foot.
Then again, Britain is different.
Your local meth head agrees. Much easier to steal the add-on unit dangling by suction cups and power cord than to hack away at the dash, and whatchagot, the shards of a Lexus GPs that no one wants...
Perhaps we can get a Taser wired up to the car, so when you break the glass you get a little bonus by touching anything in or on the car. Of course, then, the market for replacement power cords dries up.
There's no way to avoid hurting someone in this, is there...
My wife's '98 Saab 900 has a fuel gauge that is pretty accurate, down to the last few miles of travel. The OBD stuff calculates distance to empty, and I've had it down to 9 miles to empty on flat road. Accelerating then was touchy, it seems the little bit left was sloshing away from the pickup, or the pump could no longer satisfy the demand, but that's damned good.
It's also great fun to watch the DTE drop when I blow the doors off wannabees at traffic lights, or on the freeway ramp. Saab nailed turbos a long time ago, boyz. Go back to the rice shop and see if you can't get a K20 into that... And from the looks of your hood and clip, you might want to work on the brakes. Right after you top off the oil. Sheesh.
Ditto for the Mustangs - a slushbox is not the way to go, even if I do have to grind second through the mangled syncros. It's more fun right now to take care, do the limit, and watch the DTE climb on the highway... I'm getting 29.5MPG with the A/C set to Phoenix Summer Mode. 32MPG without the A/C.
Now, my '95 Explorer, that gauge is pus, but I understand it. without A/C, it goes 99 miles until the needle comes off 'F'. Then it's 150 mi to 3/4, 200 mi to 1/2, 250 mi to 1/4, and 'E' gets hit about 300-320 mi, depending on the commute and my patience. My wife rarely sees 280mi on a tank. And when it dips below 'E', I can get 19 gal. into it. The tank is rated 22gal. give or take. I've never been able to get 20 gals. into it even bone dry and a gallon from the AAA guy to get me to a station. I think of the gauge in the Explorer as a trend indicator. My Taurus before that was pretty much the same, and the earlier Taurus was dangerously out of gas when the needle got near the 'E'. I had an old Datsun 310 that would drop from 3/4 to 1/4 in 20 miles. Fun when you're up in the Maine woods and the nearest station is 40 miles away... Whatta POS that car was.
What?
Just from experience, wouldn't it be a wonderful world with bug-free firmware? Sadly, when I was having lunch with software 'engineers', it was enlightening to listen to them share their latest bug fixes. For stuff I never thought would have a bug. Hubs, switches, routers, oh my... So it's not possible that even a CD player might be shipped with a defect? Of course not, and certainly there could never be any combination of data on a Red Book CD that would result in difficulty for the occasional bug... Naw. Can't be. Now, badly mastered CDs were pretty common at the beginning, like some early DVDs. Most of the complaints were more on the order of program quality, things like noise floor, hearing the brass section re-enter and close the stage door, things you might never hear on analog recordings.
And I'm not referring to physical defects. Different problems.
I'm also not equaing CDs and MDs. I know the difference, and MD have different issues being lossy. Just don't get me started on MD and MP3. My MD player is still head and shoulders better quality than any MP3 I've heard. It just is.
But I did refer a little to the differences in CD players - not really elaborating on DACs. I remember when Burr-Brown was the be-all/end-all of DACs, and the whole BBD thing. I got into BBDs for pitch-shifting. A few players were mass-produced with sockets for the DACs, letting the brand choose something different, usually for S/N ratio.
And then, after all this, you've got people (http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/eac/eac_2.html) who think there is variability in CDs, bringing out jitter, physical mastering issues, and their own software techniques to decode a CD. What, there's more than one way???
Eh.
ps.. the AK-DL1 isn't an Ethernet cable. It's a Denon Link cable. Digital audio. Still massively overpriced for me, but it's not Ethernet. Think Monster Cable. Overpriced, but not always average quality. Just overpriced.
Have the corporate lawyers tell you what you need to save.
That's the simple part for you
Save it. Not so easy, often, but there are plenty of tools. I'm not paid by anybody to market them to you.
If you're with a business that has clear legal needs to save electronic correspondence, I'm surprised you haven't already been getting the sales pitch. Or maybe your executive team has been.
Again, the claim that CD software is always going to decode the data flawlessly is yet to be proven. It should, but again some makers would cheat as much as possible on the processor, RAM, whatever to get the unit out the door for a profit. This is MUCH less common nowadays, since the hardware is pretty cheap, and processors are vastly better than back in the late 80s. My first player was a Sony, and it was fine. The next, a Denon, was not my friend, though most of the problems were with the UI.
I'm going to have to look harder for the problem passages I worked with back around 1992. We were discussing it on minidisc.org, but I can't find the emails yet. Another archive I have to get and load.
Yes, I have emails from 1990 and before. Don't ask. I have spam samples from then to about 2004, when spam stopped being cool and started being nasty.
You know, your $30 player might indeed play these back just fine. But you're not that familiar with decoding CDs, methinks.
First, consider the various types of decoders; 1-bit vs parallel for instance. If your player is marginally designed, perhaps it has a hard time asctually delivering maximum slew rate. The passages I have been able to find that challenge players usually have either aun unsually wide dynamic range or significant power in a wide bandwidth. I'm ignoring CD defects, since error correction isn't the issue I'm referring to. The reality is that each maker of CD mechanisms has to write or buy firmware to do the decoding, manage the hardware, and provide a UI. There isn't one standard fimware out there. Some just might not handle a specific set of data quite the way another did, and some doesn't at all.
This distinct from the problems of jitter, for instance, that plague most players.
Of course, as noted elsewhere in this thread, poor mastering (encoding) can cause problems for players. This is pretty rampant in DVDs, where poor mastering can lead to unusable discs for certain players. It may be the player's software, but who cares... I have been told that most DVD mastering problems are in the past. We'll see.
Last, however, but not least, consider the various CD players for PCs. No monolithic playback software here - much variety, and much variety in perceived quality also. No self-respecting audiophile will use a PC to play back CDs for critical listening - too many variables, and then you get to the software. I'm aware of only one motherboard that claimed decent audio output from the onboard set, and that was an Acer with a tube preamp, the AX4B-533. Cute, but it didn't really impress me.
Actually, when you put it that way, HDTV resolution, after compression, 1080 isn't really 1080 is it? If your point is that we should expect that a given resolution won't necessarily be what it is, then I'm in agreement. Do we get even what they say we get? .
"HD stations often have wildly varying levels of picture quality that change from one moment to the next"
Huh? You mean Stargate Atlantis is being broadcast on changing resolutions in midstream?
No, not exactly, I bet.
I've seen pleny of my best friend's 52" LCD, and HD can be very very nice. DiscoveryHD is probably the best on a consistent basis, and he uses DirecTV. But the problems are multiple and frustrating. Typical programming, for instance:
A 720i or 1080i program looks pretty good. Then it goes to commercial, which is probably 480i. Pillarboxing ensues. Icky, but at least the aspec ratio is accurate. I see a lot of this on ABC network programming - especially sports, when they do studio shots of the taking heads. Sometimes the local ad slot goes out in SD, and looks pretty crappy. But hey, some affiliates are actually incompetent, or are carrying ads that were not rescanned - you know, used car lots can be cheap advertisers.
Sometimes, you see something in HD that is fairly sharp, like a recent movie that is upconverted. Then you get a dark, still scene. The background degenerates into a flat matte. When the characters move, you see a few artifacts and blocking. Woopsie, somebody doesn't have enough TV for this. I've seen the same DVD scene on three TVs, and made note of the scene change. On the 52" Sony LCD Proj set, it blocked a bit, consistently. On the Sharp Aquos 37" LCD, no blocking. On the 13" SDTV, the DVD player fritzed out and blacked for about 5 frames I think. On my. Those terrible artifacts may not be the signal. Your set may have a hard time decoding and displaying some uniquely challenging data. This is not new - I have a CD of a symphony that has a passage that is rarely decoded cleanly by any player but the very best. Not the mostg expensive, but the best. And I have another that cannot be played back cleanly by my MiniDisc player/recorder - it has a clearly heard problem with the program material. This should be a rare occurence, even unique to 2 or 3 incidents in your entire collection. But it isn't that unique with HDTV. Sometimes the motion-control stuff or enhancements just don't do very well. I'm not complaining much though.
The "picture quality that change(s) from one moment to the next" complaint is probably more like the pictue quality is in fact changing, cause we have differing program sources. In NTSC, this was evident in the difference between a movie scan, direct-to-tape programming (many soaps are like this), and live (the Today Show, for instance). It didn;t matter much, just cause nothing really looked so much better or worse in NTSC. Of course, those old commercials on U-Matic sure looked awful, but then they got enhanced just as HD got started up. Ick.
My biggest complaint is 'digital TV'. Like digital cable. Pus. So compressed, the solarizaiton is off the scale. MPEG compression making the field in a soccer game into a flat green painting. Whip pans end up smaearing everything. The ball gets lost if it and the camera are moving wrong. Movies like the Batman series, that are dark, become shades of brown, indecipherable. I haven't see Fahrenheit 451, but I wonder how that looks. Some of the white scenes must be precious indeed.
Then there's the whole SD-stretching thing. I loathe this. When even Callista Flockhart looks a little pudgy, you know that stretching SD to fill the screen is really wrong. But most everyone configures their HDTV to do this. So it looks like crap, so what? I paid for that screen, and I'm gonna use all of it.
We are on the verge of seeing Televison move to the Internet. Your TV will have enough horsepower to decode most anything, and new codecs will be coming fast and furious. FIOS and YouTube melded into ipTV, and sold by the minute if they can figure out how. Or blended with ads that can't be skipped or ignored. Recording flag? Not necessary. A simple DRM scheme makes it impossible to divert the stream to a capture device. Unless, of course, an op
"Can you imagine if we we still had to pay royalties to whatever company bought the rights to Shakespeare's estate every time a school drama club wanted to put on Hamlet?"
I wonder. Where do you go to get a script for Hamlet? Wikipedia? Oh, darn, it might, just MIGHT not be accurate.
Or maybe the library. You'll need at least three copies of it, I suspect, to rehearse with. Off to the Xerox...
Actually, the best example of not making a lot of sense to the quick-to-leap, but in the end making some good sense, is the issue of buying sheet music for some of the classic symphonies, say Beethoven's Fifth. Yes, you can still buy it, you are prohibited by copyright from duplicating the music you purchase, and the companies that produce said sheet music do a good business. Why?
Accuracy, allegedly. While Beethoven wrote his symphony a while ago, and is long dead (him, not the music), he did not write an arrangement for every conceivable orchestral configuration. Not even for guitar. So if you want a score, from which to play, you need to find one arranged to your needs, say one without oboe or perhaps for just piano, i dunno.
There are companies out there that do this. Produce scores based on their concept of the original, changes as necessary to accomodate performance or perhaps just current taste, I dunno that either. But they do, and they copyright their expression of the Fifth. And other works as well, I betcha.
Is it copyrightable? Sure. It's your work. Beethoven can't complain any more, and his estate is too far gone.
But we want to hear his music, and that means having a score for it to be played from. And someone has to print that score, in form useful for orchestra, etc. This is good, and probably copyrightable, since if I wanted to publish scores of the Fifth, I would have to go to some effort to find the original score (probably pay the owner for the opportunity to study it and copy it...), arrange it for current prchestra, maintain it, produce copies, so forth. Am I entitled to some compensation for this? Yes. and if so, am I entitled to some protection from others that merely copy my work without any additional effort? I think so.
I know this will rankle some of you, but indeed, merely copying someone's work is pretty cheap. Doing it to avoid the cost of paying them for it is cheap too. Doing it to profit by their effort is theft. Copyright laws don't determine that, they recognize and punish the theft. If you add value somehow, you can make your case that your derivitave work deserves protection also. And then you can compete.
Just my 2cents. After asking my wife how much it cost to purchase performance rights for a Broadway play, I got interested in this. Turns out, there's no such thing as free theatre, if you want the original script.
darn.
Responding to ACs is usually not worth the effort, but in this case...
The word 'trust' is Childs' word, not mine. He apparently said it. I take him at his word.
Not Gavin Newsome, but that's a different thread.
You can't make this shit up.
A *SPAMMER* escapes from a Club Fed. Sheesh, he learns quick in lockup, huh?
"In this particular case, he might've saved the city of San Francisco millions of dollars in lost productivity from someone getting access who had no clue what they were doing."
I've worked with this type before. Damn, I've *BEEN* this type before.
Maybe, maybe not. Sounds like this admin was convinced that the rest of the crew were dangerous idiots. Maybe he's unusually paranoid. I vote for paranoid. Just as dangerous as being right, for different reasons. Imagine serious problems occurring while he is in jail. His propable response might be "See? You need to let me out of here so I can fix this and prevent disaster". Suuuuure... I imagine the authorities will swing the door open and let him out to 'fix' things.
If for no other reason, this poor admin is incompetent in a novel, or NOT novel way. He has no competent backup. A kidney stone, myocardial infarct, or even a knee replacement would leave him out of commission, and SF exposed to loss of network. Sheesh. You back up data, you should back up staff as well, wherever possible, and this is clearly in the realm of 'possible'. Even 'essential'.
Of course, the funniest part of this to me is where he claims he can only trust Gavin Newsome. That's F-U-N-N-Y!
It seems as if the most difficult problem with this story is to stick to the facts.
For instance, a quick look here:http://www.aim.org/special-report/myths-memos-and-dan-rather-a-nation-remembers/ gives up a list of purported facts and statements. Feel free to dispute any of them. I'll be watching for your replies.
If Dan Rather trusted his production staff, writers, reporters, fact-checkers, and editors, then he can only be excused for having been fooled. But being willing to be fooled by an attractive story makes you a willing fool. When I first heard about this story, way back then, I was disappointed - my favored candidate seemed to have some not very nice incidents in his past, and I worried that he would end up being shown as an opportunist, taking advantage of every chance to enrich himself at the expense of others, and avoiding risk wherever possible. I'm speaking obout GWBush, in case you were confused. Then, as I read more and waited for more facts to appear, I began to realize that his opponents were attempting to take another insignificant issue and turn it into something it wasn't. I felt a little better. Of course, the stories of Senator Kerry's Vietnam exploits left with the same impression, which didn't get better as more facts came out.
The Niger story is really becoming an interesting item to me now, of all times, because it is becoming apparent, to any who care to examine the current facts, that there was and is a rational basis for the belief that Saddam Hussein would have been looking for sources of yellowcake uranium. He already had substantial supplies of it, and was preparing facilities to enrich it into useable fissionable material. Looking for more would not be illogical. We just spirited out a fair amount of yellowcake, sold to a Canadian firm, only this month. We can argue about whether or not Saddam actually did contact Niger or any other supplier, but let's not be disingenuous and pretend it wasn't possible, ok? And remember, this issue had fooled the CIA, Most of the US military, the NSA, and British and French intelligence agencies, along with others. I've come to the belief that in the case against Saddam, the Administration was willing to believe the worst, on the flimsiest evidence. Not the first time that has happened.
Back to these memos, though, CBS and Dan Rather didn't have to ride that horse into the ground. They could have let the whole thing boil dry with 'we'll never know for sure' comments, and made the poitns they could. Instead, Rather would not let go. His bad judgement.
And consider the source of the copies. Unfortunate.
One of those things we may never be sure about, though I'm fairly well convinced. No, not to the point of it being impossible, but beyond reasonable doubt.
And then there's the issue of what was being accused through the use of these memos. I find the attempt to demean our President's military service to lack credibility. Enough.
Oh, I know about the Model D Executive - I referenced it several times in my post.
To change a character on the Executive, you would have to either replace a typebar, or solder on a new slug. Neither trivial.
And typefaces similar to what was shown on the copies of the memos would nto have been MS Times New Roman. A better choice would be Courier New. I found an excellent list of fonts for the Selectric Composer on this http://www.ibmcomposer.org/docs/Selectric%20Composer%20Operations%20Manual.pdf site, what a great manual! Not good matches for MS fonts there, but if I were trying to fake a typewriter in Windows after v3.1 or 3.11, I would find many good fonts to choose from. Go have a look. Many choices. If you are willing to use a Macintosh, so much easier, as ATM fonts have several typewriter-identical options, if I recall. Bodoni was pretty common back then. No problem faking a typeface on a computer. Even easier if you use something like a CPT, Genesis, or maybe OS/6 word processor, though having the originals would end the speculation.
I really doubt the Colonel had an Executive. Despite IBM's marketing-speak, Execs were not very common outside of the Fortune 100 at that time, or in certain specific industries. Having an Exec would not enhance routine correspondence for an ANG unit, and the first servidce agreement or repair invoice would get it tossed in a closet and something more affordable brought out to replace it. We charged 3-4 times Selectric costs for all proportional space machines, and more for the Selectric Composer. GSA permitted that.
Sadly, I am not yet convinced these documents are genuine. I can't say it's impossible that they are.
I'm a former typewriter technician from 'those days'. You are ignoring some significant information.
Back 'then', and up to about 1990, typewriters were, as you pointed out, capable of printing fonts other than Courier and Prestige Elite. Such machines were somewhat rare, the most common alternative being Orator from IBM.
More significant, however were two features of 'those' documents: Proportional spacing and text centering. These capabilities were significantly less common, and centering is not a typewriter feature - it is an operator's skill.
Looking at one of the documents here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Guardgif.gif, you can see in the first paragraph the word 'Ellington'. It appears to me that the 'i' is properly spaced for proportional type. This limits the available typeariters at that time to pretyt much the IBM Executive or IBM Composer, neither of which were common, and both would have been uncommon on GSA purchasing. It's possible that the Lt. Colonel who is shown as the author could have a clerk using one of these, but very unlikely.
More interesting, the unit designation in the second paragraph, 111th F.L.S., has the superscripted 'th'. I don't think this was common on even the Composer, but maybe the Excecutive would have had that character. So this document was probably typed on an IBM Excecutive machine?
It doesn't seem likely that this was typed on any Selectric machine. There are characteristics that pretyt much leave out a Selectrtic as the source.
This picture of the document is pretty much inadequate for more serious analysis, sadly. It's been thorugh too many duplications, and many characteristics of the type are lost and useless for further investigation. Looking at the 'r's in the document, some are missing serifs. The word 'MEMORANDUM' has the 'R' dropped significantly, where further on the line the word 'FOR' is fairly well aligned. This is not easy to do on a typewriter, but then again the quality of the picture makes it nearly impossible to do a better analysis.
When I first saw these documents, I was astonished. These were not typed.
Oh, and the centering? On a proportional space machine, this is not a trivial operation. You need to space characters using 1,3,4, or 5 sub-spaces, and I forget the technical term for this level of escapment. A fair amount of training, and practice, are necessary. Maybe the clerk for a Pentagon commander has this skill, but not likely the clerk for a Texas ANG officer.
Nice try, but this was a fake. Though I'd LOVE to see the originals. The ink and impressions would answer a lot of questions. Copies fail these tests.
Give it up. Rather was fooled, and willingly so.
Let's ban all-electronic balloting so WE won't get fooled again, k?
ps- you wrote "The claims that the documents were fake, were based on the incorrect belief that typewriters could not produce superscript "st" and "nd"". Name me four. Hint, one I mentioned above. Second hint, ignore Adler typewriters, none used in GSA back then. Third hint, ignore Smith-Corona, Facit, Underwood, they dndn't make that sort of machine. Fourth hint, stick to IBM, Olympia, Royal. NOt so sure about Royal. You don't know typewriters.
Harrr... I *still* adminster a Wildcat!BBS. Just don't ask, ok? It's necessary...
But WfW, wow it was a lot of OS. I ran it with Trumpet Winsock and hit AOL over my lame ISP's 56k DDS2 uplink to a 'real' ISP that had an MCI T-1. AOL of IP, beat the crap out of long-distance phone bills. How much obosolete stuff did I just mention...
But WfW was fair, and I only had to reboot every 4 hours of surfing or so. Only every 10th or so print job would turn into garbage and require a reboot to flush the spooler correctly.
Then I bought Windows 95, Upgrade version.
Ran it 29 days straight. No reboots. Woot!
And the first service pack was downloaded. Never ran more than a week at a time after that. Win98 was pretty much the same, I could get it to go a month if I didn't use it much.
Got a cable modem about the time I put Win2k to work at home. This was n-i-c-e. Went 2 months or so without a reboot, and it was testing my home Novell server as well as surfing as hard as I could. And ftp-ing, IRC, Usenet, the works.
It took about 3 years for XP to be as stable as 2000 for me.
Damn, the good old days. They really did suck, didn't they?
"helping people get off welfare"
As if it's about helping people get off welfare. Keeping them off welfare would be the right strategy, by:
Ensuring citizens and legal residents get a crack at jobs, no matter the pay. Oh, and watch the pay increase when employers can't rely on indentured servitude to fill their positions. No one in Washington seems to want to tackle this, and damned few states either. Alternatively, be honest and just abandon immigration laws. Not enforcing the law leads to contempt by both the criminal and the honest citizen.
Ending abuse of visa programs. Plenty of actual citizens (and legal residents too) are looking for IT jobs. The H1B program is a disgrace, and needs either reform or abolition. Maybe both. Sorry, but H1Bs are a scam, Bill G. Nice try.
Stop throwing US industry under the bus via most-favored-nation-status gimmes, near total lack of tarriffs on subsidised imports, and tax/economic policies that encourage offshoring everything from shoemakers to CEOs. This in particular is not a new problem, but goes back to the 70s easily.
Just three ideas that might make it possible for Americans to earn a livable wage and never have to be helped off of welfare.
ps- maybe we get more science majors out of this? Another idea that's getting some traction - a New GI Bill. Where do you suppose so many of those NASA engineers, technicians, and scientists came from during the 60s? Wouldn't hurt our troops to come home and have options, either.It's not about the motors, Sparky. It's about the fuel.
Electric fuel is still difficult for cars. Petrol is so easy, just a tank and some plumbing. Electicity is somewhat more difficult to store, carry, and dispense. Not more or less dangerous, per se, just a technology we haven't bothered to develop much.
And it can be solved. We just have to decide where to make the electricity. Onboard, say fuel cells? Centrally, and where do we plug in to get a refill?
As an example of how much fun it is to make an electric car, I looked something up. Current Prius batteries are rated at 6.5Ah. The Apollo Lunar Module batteries were rated at 2.18Ah total. So the LM had about 1/3 the capacity of a Prius. Of course, a Prius can recharge the batteris with the onboard gas motor/generator, and regenerative braking. But an example of how far we haven't come in battery technology. The LEM didn't carry much weight, but packed a 1/3 of a Prius in capacity. I suspect if we apply ourselves, we can do better with batteries.
And the answer may not be batteries - capacitors might be better. I wonder how big a cap would have to be to equal the Prius battery pack... 20-30F? That would be fun! I've seen what a 2F/15000V cap does to a radar shack. Sweeeet....
Oh, and if 6.5Ah doesn't sound like much, it didn't to me either. The pack runs at 273V approx.
It really isn't about the motors.
I'm tellin' ya, those guys down to DHS are funnier than a rubber crutch. Really, they come up with some whoppers. Imagine, a shock bracelet. Like I can type with that thing on. Or go to the bathroom. What happens if I spill my $2 Coke on it?
Seriously, proof once again that Jay Leno has the easiest job in all of the world. Made so because, clearly, he has the entire US federal government working for him, generating mountains of good stuff for his writers to merely sort and index.
You can't make this stuff up.
Everyone deserves a fair trial, and a hanging.
Or something like that...
The Gulf Stream doesn't reach that far inland yet. Wait a minute while I fire up My H1 and make some carbon.
Of course, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia are warmer than Quebec, which makes them cooler. If you get my drift. Or current. Or Stream.
The Quebecois get a bad rap. They just want things their way, and who doesn't, eh?