Those specs stink.

If the two sensors are being used to cross-check each other, they need to run in opposite directions. 0v-5v for the one sensor, 5v-0v for the other. That's the only way to get anything close to a sensible cross-check. Of course you won't be able to spot a shot at the crossover, but that should be easy to determine.

> an experienced driver knows that in a battle between engine and brakes, the engine will win, so it's utterly vital to get the engine out of play early on.

No. The brakes win on any car modern enough to have seatbelts - provided that you brake like you mean it. If you drag the brakes for two miles before deciding to actually get on them, of course the fluid will long since have boiled. That is what happened in this case. If you make the 'I need to stop now, this car is out of control' call and use the brake with authority you can bring the car to a complete stop.

I'm more worried about the start-stop button. Taking a three second press to turn off in some circumstances is obvious to us (PCs do the same thing) but would it be obvious in a car? We will end up with a label because of this, just you watch.

Pardon, correcting myself. The Chroma is stored separately from the Luma in each tape format, but decks didn't let you get the signals in or out any way other than composite until the Super versions. This effectively made them the same as if the signals were stored in a composite fashion. Either format has something like 30 lines of chroma resolution anyway, so it is hardly much of a race there.

You're just plain inaccurate. First: the GP post already mentioned the loss in resolution when they went to Beta II. Second, no, only the Super versions of both formats store the signal in a split fashion. The regular versions do not. Last, the first one-piece camcorder was the Betamovie. The tapes were completely identical to the home decks.

It's called Running Start. You can substitute the last two years of high school with two years of community college and still receive a high school diploma. I graduated community college and high school at the same time. Then if you transfer to a state university or college you will already have your first two years of general education completed. It's a great program and basically costs nothing; the college receives the money that the high school would have received from the state anyway.

The HPNA Coax adapters are only about $70, and the best solution if you can't repull new Category 5 cable. Google Products shows plenty of stores with them in stock. You will get 100Mbit and the reliability of the ones I've used has been quite good. They are also available in phone line versions if that's the sort of wiring you have around.

Western Digital does one better - they will cross-ship a new drive if you need for only the cost of your return shipping to them. It's really handy when you have a drive kick up a pre-fail SMART error. You can get a new drive on the way before the old one fails and just do the swap out in the array. I've had to do it twice (out of 16 drives) for my home storage array over the years.

Every culture certainly has a way to pass the buck. The Japanese are no exception, and since the supplier is not Japanese, it can be easier to blame them.

Yes, their coverage so far has suggested there's more to this problem than just the stated accelerator problems. Remember that this is a Japanese company, so there may be an attempt to push the problem off onto outside suppliers to avoid loss of face. There are several reports of problems that had nothing to do with a mechanically sticking pedal, and beside that the ECU software should disable the throttle-by-wire after the brake has been held down for several seconds. Other car manufacturers do that; if you hold down the brake for two seconds the throttle control is cut. Why not Toyota?

Some of the old ones make particularly great reading. The optimism is palpable. Here's June 1956 as a starting point.

Let me Google that for you. Looks like there are a wide variety, even DVD players with ATSC tuners built in. They will only get better as time goes on; early portable TVs kind of sucked too.

People are poor at selecting for some things. You think 4 wheel drive was a primary selection criteria? That may have been what people said, but it was being sold to them on freedom and safety. And interior volume? If people wanted interior volume, they would buy minivans and wagons. They wanted to sit up high. Reptile brain at work.

By Verizon, you mean Sprint, right? The deal was widely publicized.

Then you were an idiot. The only difficult to service part on the original iMac was the power board. The rest was easy; I did warranty service for Apple at the time and loved working on those machines.

iTunes is missing one big feature: you cannot keep your library in lossless and transcode it automatically to lossy when it goes on the player. Oh, the feature is there, it is just grayed out. You can use it with the Shuffle, but with any other iPod, no luck.