Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Car that runs on water?

So I saw this and like most things that are too good to be true, this one probably is (too good to be true that is). The thing that surprises me the most though is how the media has posted it without any background work. It would be really cool if this thing did work but I would be willing to bet a lot on it. If this car can really do the things that it says it can do, we are going to have to rewrite a lot of physics books.

First check out the video...



Now that you are all excited and thinking about how you can buy a jug of water and run your car on it...

Check out the skeptics opinions on Wikipedia here.

Now we all know that Wikipedia is not the authority for what is correct, but these things are not so off base. I will be very interested to see what becomes of this little miracle car, and if it does work how quickly is it going to disappear?

Not to get all conspiracy theory, because theoretically this car is just as possible as learning to fly to work like superman, but Big Brother government doesn't like things that it can not tax. Think about it. Cigarettes are legal, but pot is not. They are both health risks, but you can grow your own pot and the government makes a lot of money off of those cancer sticks. All of our traffic infrastructure is paid for at least in part by fuel taxes. Hmmm...how do they tax water? According to that video I can refuel the car with salt water. That is going to make the return trip from the beach really cheap.

Look out Verizon you have competition...

So I was on the phone for 2 hours this morning with Earthlink support. To say the least they were rude and unhelpful. I have be an Earthlink customer since October of 2002, and whether it was a technical problem or an ignorant oversight my account was completely deleted or purged from their system.

I noticed that I had stopped getting the annoying forwards from some distant relatives that only had my old Earthlink email address. I have been using gmial and they were just fine using the Earthlink address, and since I had it forwarded to my gmail account I was just fine with that too. Then I decided that I was going to use one of those old addresses to sign up for an online offer, and was unable to get email conformation. SO I sent a test email, and it bounced. Ok no big deal I will just go to their site and check the account settings...

So the very long story kind of short is that the account was deleted and there was no trace record anywhere in their system. No one knew anyone about this, and proceeded to tell me that I was delusional and that I never had an account. When I asked to have the issue escalated to have someone more competent deal with the problem I was told that since I was a "free email user" I was not entitled to customer support and was promptly hung up on.

Is that any way to treat a long term customer? Apparently this was not the first time this has happened and a google search will show more similar cases that strangely started around the same dates.

Earthlink sucks...