Hybrid car owners natonwide (yes, all 9 of them) are incensed over the low gas mileage they’ve been seeing from their super efficient vehicles. It seems that claims of 46 - 70 miles per gallon are falling far short –about 40% short to be more exacting– of the EPA estimates.

Hey, green guy! Welcome to the club. If you’d been paying attention for the last 19 years you’d have already known that the EPA estimates are WAAAAYYY over inflated. That’s why my Dodge Ram Hemi pickup (”Can you say ‘Hemi’?”) rated at 13 city, 17 highway has never gotten better than 11.5 mpg.

Of course, you’re still feeling smug because you now understand that while your Prius is tooting along at only 31mpg, I’m probably taking out Home Equity Loans to pay for my gasoline just to get to the gas station. No problem. By the time it takes you to get from 0 to 60 I’ll be where I’m going and back again (unless, God forbid, you’re in front of me) and time is also money. (By the way, I’ll be dumping 1 overly toxic lead-acid battery into the environment every three - five years. How many batteries in that hybrid?)

So you can’t wait for the whole country to switch from those nasty fossil fuel autombiles to high-tech hybrid mobiles, right? Well, think again. It’s gasoline taxes that help pay for road maintenance. Hybrid vehicles will require considerably less gasoline, producing considerably less revenue, but they will subject the roadways to an equal amount of wear and tear. Where will the lost money come from?

Some states are already investigating a pay-as-you-go plan with mileage charges, in one case, quoted as high as $1.23 per mile. The average Amercian drives his/her car 12,000 - 15,000 miles per year. So if you’re perhaps a salesperson or a cab owner/driver or in any other profession that requires you to use your car –y’know, basic middle class work stuff– it’ll cost you an extra $15,000 to $18,000 per year for the privilege. The Good news is that people who eventually own Rolls Royce hybrids won’t even feel it and they don’t drive that much anyway. Of course, truckers will become a thing of the past as we switch to shipping products via the resurrected method of hydrogen balloons to keep costs down.

“…it has been picked up and used by a whole new generation in a whole new way.” Is that like what the meaning of is is? And a Pringles can! Those aren’t even real chips, they’re virtual synthesized reconstituted spud bits. But I guess it all fits together. “WiFi” is a made up word with a made up meaning. Any sensible person could tell you it should stand for “Wireles Fiction” —just like “SciFi.”

Bill has a great historical perpective but he is missing the point. “Cantenna” is a great word and concept, and it has been picked up and used by a whole new generation in a whole new way. Of course someone will try and cash in with a commercial version. Here’s to the ones who make the real cans work!

I love Alice, but sometimes her youthful exuberance keeps her from questioning things that she should otherwise view with a severely jaundiced eye –like the “Cantenna.” (See below.) It ain’t new. It aren’t even original. HeathKit made a “Cantenna” oil-filled dummy load for ham radio operators decades ago so they could tune their rigs without dirtying the bandwidth. I briefly held a ham license (KA2MKI, if I remember rightly) and the idea of a can-based antenna (as well as many other designs - shameless plug for the ARRL’s Antenna Handbook) has been around amateur radio for almost forever. Cheap as Scotsmen as they are, hams have typically home brewed their own cantennas with great success. (Have you CQ’d today?) I’m not saying that $20 is a bad deal, and I’m certainly not advocating oil-filled college dummies trying to steal WiFi service. It’s just a matter of adding some historical perspective in case next week someone comes out with a WiFi Yagi. 10-10. C-ya!

This all started as an act of desperation. College kids in search of free WiFi piggybacking rigged Pringles potato chip cans on their rooftops to find wireless signals that would normally be out of range. They dubbed the devices “cantennas.”

Now the Super Cantenna lets you do the same with a more polished $19.95 version. No chips included. According to the company, here is why you would upgrade from the snack variety of antenna:

“Why not a “home made” Cantenna? The Super Cantenna’s dimensions, shielding, and polarization have been engineered for maximum signal strength and distance, using only high-quality and lab-tested materials to manufacture the outer shell and inner parts. This ensures consistent and superior performance over typical homemade ‘Pringles’ type antennas.”

Looks like WiFi is going inside, or rather is becoming embedded in most new PCs and handhelds. Beats those add-in WiFI cards that bent or got lost. Some stats to consider from In-Stat/MDR:

* The market for embedded Wi-Fi clients (including mobile PCs, PDAs and phones) will grow at a 66.2% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) to 226.0 million units shipped in 2008.

* After five years of healthy growth since its mainstream commercialization, the worldwide Wi-Fi hardware market (i.e., network infrastructure and adapters) finally surpassed $1.0 billion in (4Q 2003) quarterly revenues.

* There has been a significant growth in Wi-Fi-enabled notebook PCs, as 55.0% of the 32.1 million notebook PCs shipped in 2003 contained embedded Wi-Fi adapters.

The Rbot-GR virus follows a fairly traditional malware route of exploiting Microsoft security vulnerabilities and installing a Trojan horse on infected machines. However, the worm also spies on users by taking control of their webcam and microphone, then sending images and soundtracks back to the hackers, according to antivirus firm Sophos.

Go read the story.