Yearly Archives: 2012


This is just so utterly wrong 2

This is just so utterly wrong

Reshared post from +Alex Nunez

Oh no.

Florida’s most-blinged Camaro ZL1 brings out the haters in force
To paraphrase Rene Magritte, this is not a car. Yes, it is a Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 convertible, and it has an engine which can turn those 30-inch Forgiato gold saucers into forward motion. But the tran…

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Sergio rides to the rescue of a great American brand once again 3

Sergio rides to the rescue of a great American brand once again

Fiat to purchase bankrupt Hostess Brands
Italian automaker Fiat has announced their plans to purchase Hostess Brands, saving the legendary American bakery from liquidation. “Iconic Hostess products such as the Twinkie®, the Ring Din…

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+John Voelcker drives the new +Ford Motor Company C-Max Energi PHEV

+John Voelcker drives the new +Ford Motor Company C-Max Energi PHEV

He finds that you actually can drive it on electrons for about 20 miles

Reshared post from +Green Car Reports

What's Ford's first plug-in hybrid really like to drive? Well … a lot like the hybrid version, but …. 

2013 Ford C-Max Energi Plug-In Hybrid: First Drive
The 2013 Ford C-Max Energi is the first plug-in hybrid from Ford to hit the road, and the company sold 144 of them in October even before letting journalists drive the car. It’s the pricier and more c…

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The new 1.0-liter EcoBoost from +Ford Motor Company does fit in the overhead bi… 3

The new 1.0-liter EcoBoost from +Ford Motor Company does fit in the overhead bin

Ford Built An Engine So Small They Were Able To Send It Through Airport Security
Going through TSA checkpoints when flying is always a chore. You have to chug your booze, take off your shoes, belt, aluminum underpants, empty your pockets, and take your laptop and engine blocks out…

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Enterprises (including campaigns) need to think more carefully about what is str…

Enterprises (including campaigns) need to think more carefully about what is strategic

Outsourcing and offshoring can really come back to bite you in the ass if you're not careful. In the case of the Romney campaign, it seems like all of its vaunted Orca project should have been considered a strategic effort.

Instead, the Romney campaign did what many corporations have done in tight times—it kept its IT budget in check and heavily outsourced technology relative to its budget, keeping only a few strategic efforts in-house.

If the parties are smart (something they rarely show evidence of) they would be developing these systems now, long before the pressure of a campaign and keep them online for continual development and testing. Once the nominee is selected, those resources would be made available to the candidates team instead of having to reinvent the wheel every four years. 

Reshared post from +Koushik Dutta

Romney's flopped "Orca" project possibly built by Best Buy?

Well, that explains that…

Romney campaign got its IT from Best Buy, Staples, and friends
MindShift Technologies and small firms handled most of campaign’s internal tech.

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It's not about big government, it's about corporatocracy

In the now-withdrawn RSC paper on the myths of copyright, the authors blame the issue on government getting too big.

Can we ever have too much copyright protection?

Yes. The Federal government has gotten way too big, and our copyright law is a symptom of the expansion in the size and scope of the federal government.

_Today copyright law is seen by many as a form of corporate welfare 
that hurts innovation and hurts the consumer. It is a system that picks winners and losers, and the losers are new industries that could generate new wealth and added value.  We frankly may have no idea how it actually hurts innovation, because we don't know what isn't able to be produced as a result of our current system._

In fact, it's not about the growth of big government, it's about the evolution from a democracy into a corporatocracy where big business interests control the levers of power. 

Embedded Link

http://lauren.vortex.com/WITHDRAWN-Republican-Study-Committee-Intellectual-Property-Brief.pdf

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Anyone interested in reading the RSC report on copyright can get it here 1

I don't often agree with Republican politicians but at first look, this looks very sensible.

Reshared post from +Lauren Weinstein

The House Republican Study Committee issued a remarkably interesting brief on intellectual property yesterday — then suddenly withdrew it it today!   Why?   Follow the money!  In any case, I preserved a copy of the original report, and have marked it so that there can be no confusion about the fact that the RSC has disowned it (see below for RSC letter): http://lauren.vortex.com/WITHDRAWN-Republican-Study-Committee-Intellectual-Property-Brief.pdf
– – –
From: Teller, Paul
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2012 04:11 PM
Subject: RSC Copyright PB 

We at the RSC take pride in providing informative analysis of major policy issues and pending legislation that accounts for the range of perspectives held by RSC Members and within the conservative community. Yesterday you received a Policy Brief on copyright law that was published without adequate review within the RSC and failed to meet that standard. Copyright reform would have far-reaching impacts, so it is incredibly important that it be approached with all facts and viewpoints in hand. As the RSC’s Executive Director, I apologize and take full responsibility for this oversight. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and a meaningful Thanksgiving holiday…. 

Paul S. Teller
Executive Director
U.S. House Republican Study Committee
Paul.Teller@mail.house.gov
http://republicanstudycommittee.com

Embedded Link

http://lauren.vortex.com/WITHDRAWN-Republican-Study-Committee-Intellectual-Property-Brief.pdf

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Well this explains why when I tried to download this document last night, the link…

Well this explains why when I tried to download this document last night, the link had nothing there.  Screw the MPAA and RIAA.

Reshared post from +Dan Gillmor

House Republicans liked the idea of serious copyright reform, but it looks like they also report to Hollywood when push comes to shove.

That Was Fast: Hollywood Already Browbeat The Republicans Into Retracting Report On Copyright Reform | Techdirt
So, late Friday, we reported on how the Republican Study Committee (the conservative caucus of House Republicans) had put out a surprisingly awesome report about copyright reform. You can read that p…

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My friend +Alex Nunez spotted a Lotus M100 Elan on the streets of Manhattan.

My friend +Alex Nunez spotted a Lotus M100 Elan on the streets of Manhattan.

After earning my engineering degree, I went to work at what was then Delco Moraine NDH (it later became Delphi and got spun off from +General Motors) on anti-lock brake systems. Amazingly my first assignments were working on the ABS for the Elan and the race version of the Esprit known as the X180R. What more could a young, freshly minted engineer ask for than to work on a pair of Lotus sports cars?

The Elan was a first in many ways for Lotus, reviving the name of one of the company's classics for its first ever front wheel drive model. Roger Becker, Ken Miles and the other chassis wizards at Hethel came up with some brilliant solutions to the problem of using the same axle to do propulsion and steering. If you hopped in and didn't know which end was providing the tractive effort and pushed the Elan around a track, you might not guess that it wasn't rear drive. This was mainly due to a rear suspension geometry that incorporated some passive steering by toeing in under side loading. 

As fun as the Elan was drive, it was unfortunately expensive to build despite the Isuzu turbo-four under the hood and even with its $40,000 price tag, Lotus still lost money on every example they sold. As a result Lotus ended up cancelling the Elan after just three years of production. That decision came about five weeks before the ABS system I worked on started production so the only ABS equipped Elans were the handful of development prototypes and about a dozen pilot production examples. 

It's a shame that the Elan went away prematurely, but the result was that Lotus regrouped and returned to the their roots to create the Elise a few years later without which Lotus probably wouldn't be with us today. 

Photo by thenoonz • Instagram
thenoonz’s photo on Instagram

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