Gay horns. Nothing says cheap like a one-tone meep-meep horn. Cadillac is one of the few who has done horns right, opting for a 4-tone trumpet blast from heaven that commands attention while also pleasing the ear.

Chrome plated plastic. It's just shitty. There's a whole isle of the stuff at the auto supply store. Let the mooks who love it buy the crap themselves rather than applying it at the factory. I'm talking to you Ford Focus.

I'd buy this for $100 at a Halloween shop in a heartbeat.

Incorporate it into a motorcycle helmet.

That's convenient.

When I heard the word "maglev" my hopes and dreams were crushed. Maglev instantly meant prohibitively expensive, technologically masturbatory and would require massive amounts of electricity paired with the construction of an entirely new infrastructure.

Seriously, this is Monorail 2, and it's going to be nothing more than a huge money pit that will have to charge an order of magnitude more money for tickets than competing airfare or self-drive solutions that already exist. Nevada has a great track record for eating government money with little return on investment. Yucca Mountain is the best example of this, but the nuclear testing facilities and secret air bases also illustrate this.

Oh well, it's better than throwing money after health care, education, or iPhones. I guess.

I think you're smart for waiting, even though you're a gadget guru and that's something akin to having consumer OCD. The will power you must possess astounds me. Have you ever extinguished a candle with will power alone? You should try it, but I digress.

The big holdup for me is still the lack of being able to use the iPhone as a 3g modem for my computer. Paying $500 for internet service that I can only use for my phone is completely frivolous for me. If I could pair it with my laptop and use it on the road, I'd be hard pressed not to get in line for it right this second.

MicroSDHC would also be nice, but not essential.

Runs relatively lightweight on XP and catches a good number of things. Tied to a parent server, it allows for centralized management of virus protection on all computers on the network. It also allows for remote install and configuration on all machines. Makes life much easier once there's at least 5 computers to deal with.

I'd take the gun over the gas card too. Better resale value and more bang for the buck. Har Har.

I forgot to add this:

CCD is technologically superior to CMOS in my research. The highest end digital imaging sensors are all CCD. The medium format backs made my Leaf and PhaseOne, for instance are CCD. Same goes for those used in astrophotography. Backs like these tend to run $15,000-$30,000 though.
[www.phaseone.com]

Until the D3 and D300, Nikon was totally committed to CCD, but I think they had to bite the bullet on these cameras to compete with Canon.

As for poor performance in the dark from Nikon's next flagship, it is likely that it will still shoot at 25,000 ISO, but at a much reduced pixel count. Think about it in terms of rods and cones in the eyes. The rods are ganglion nerves, so you have a certain number of them, say 10 connected to a single nerve. Light is gathered by 10 "sensors" but transmitted as a single electrical impulse. Using a similar technology in cameras enables very good low-light performance at a reduced resolution.

I'm not making this shit up either. If you look at camera specs, you will find that high iso = lower than max resolution. Whether they let pixels team up to capture light, I don't know, but it stands to reason that maybe they do.

The next big thing in image sensors isn't going to be Megapixels, it's going to be dynamic range. We're already seeing it with 14-bit RAW files. I wouldn't be surprised to see a 6 megapixel 16-bit/32-bit camera come out in the next couple of years. I would imagine that it will use a similar "ganglion" technology to capture 9 stops of light in one image, rather than the 5-ish we get now.

Good article, hope you had fun researching it.

[www.anxietyapp.com]

As a Mac user and photographer, Aperture is my personal pick.

I love the speedier upgrade cycles Apple is on since switching to Intel CPU's. It's not quite enough to make me feel obligated to upgrade, but it provides updates entry points for new users and schmucks who held onto their G4's for a bit too long.

Love the fat, sexy tires and the Volvo powetrain though.

I think Jalopnik should hire a 60 year old man to write some articles. Deadlines be damned!

[www.flickr.com] - Unimog (or something?), retrofitted with tracks
[www.lonesentry.com] - German 1-ton armored half-track Sd.Kfz. 250/9
[mailer.fsu.edu] - Burford Halftrack
[www.prewarbuick.com] - What, a Rolls-Royce half-track?? But of course Andy Chrisanfov has the goods on it:

'This is an Alpine Eagle conversion for Russian winter roads, said to have been made especially for one Mr. Lenin back in the early '20s. The base vehicle [can you really use that term for a Rolls?] was confiscated from some member of the Russian nobility and equipped with the so-called 'Kregresse drive' -- a hang-on device converting any car to a halftrack 'Kegresse audosledge'. (Adolphe Kegresse, born French, lived in Russia and served as a consulting engineer to one of our former imperial departments. He was the very man behind the later Citroen half-track lories upon returning to his native France [see next pic below].) The car still exists and is kept in one of the still-numerous Lenin museums. RR Silver Ghost was a very popular vehicle amid the motorized Russian nobility, being a well-built and tough chariot, quite capable of withstanding our awful running conditions -- even in winter. The Czar himself had a limo on this chassis. By the way, the original Alpine Eagle tourer was a 1914 model.'

This seems like a pretty big step in the right direction for a historically egotistical company. Ballmer must be huddled up in his office suite sucking his thumb weeping.

Maybe they're hoping that by publishing those 30,000 pages of Windows documentation, the open source community will be able to figure out how to fix Vista.

NOT!

Everything about the car is beautiful and perfect, except the toilet seat up front.

fun to push....

Check out this Camaro with a door made of duct tape I found in Omaha:
[www.flickr.com]

Just shows that plastic bodies aren't all they're cracked up to be. Shattering is worse than denting, IMO.

Using a semi-transparent mirror seems way more complicated than, say, Sony's live-view approach where a switch collapses one of the prism's mirrors and lets a video sensor take over.

The last factor will be 720p/1080p capture and getting it all into a camera body for less than $200 extra.

Shipping weight is 50lbs, probably because of the included hard case.

When the woman at the booth told me it was $34k, I thought she'd just mistaken the weight for the price and didn't bother to follow up. They're going to sell tens of these. (not tons)