Posts by Seth

Inventor promises bottle-o-wind car in a year. Again

killer in an accident

One of the problems with something like a compressed air car is similar to the problems you have with ideas like massive spinning flywheels to recover energy while braking - what happens when you get into an accident?

Let's say you fill some carbon-fiber tanks with enough very high pressure air to power this vehicle up to 100km. Five miles out onto the road you get rear-ended hard and burst the air tank.

Well, we've all seen the videos of dry ice bombs made in soft drink bottles, haven't we? Magnify that effect by hundreds of times and put it a few feet away from passengers and drivers in a car accident, and you've got an awful mess.

So, Pintos used to burst into flames from time to time when hit in the rear. And this new air car? It just blows the car and everyone in it into a billion pieces.

I'm skeptical.

HD DVD fights back in the US

cut HD-DVD disk prices, not player prices

The main problem is that they're charging $25-35 per disk, and that's just way too much. If Toshiba gave incentives for movie studios to release HD-DVD disks at the same price as normal DVD releases, ie: $15-20 in the United States, they would probably sell a metric ton more disks, and that would influence the studios a lot.

I'm one of the fewls who bought a cheap HD-DVD player a few months ago when it looked like they might win, and I've bought 6 or 7 movies to try it out with, but I haven't bought one in a while because I just can't make myself pay $25 or $30 for one damn movie. It's absurd, exhorbitant, and it's a deal breaker. My upsampling HD-DVD player plays normal DVDs just fine, and they look great on my 52" lcd. HD-DVD looks better, but not better enough to cost me an extra $10 per movie.