"IT" Revealed - (Ginger)

You think people are as ignorant as you feign to be and can't see the difference between someone owning up to their mistake while pointing out another person's mistake yet that other person refuses so adamantly to acknowledged his own error that he'd chose to increasingly compound his error and continually attack the person for pointing out the error.

That's a run-on sentence. C-

Finally, I'm not an engineer, but I don't think that IT uses gravity to move. I believe that all of the locomotive energy comes from the batteries. The easiest way to see this is to note that, when moving on level ground, the center of gravity doesn't fall. Therefore the gravitational potential does not change. But then again, I could be wrong.

Well I am an engineer and you are absolutely right about this. Gravity is not powering this vehicle. The IT sensors detect that you are leaning forward and this results in the wheels being driven in the forward direction. Ditto leaning left, right or backwards. Leaning left or right is obviously a little more complicated since one wheel goes CW and the other has to to CCW but that is just one of the details that they spent $100 million working out.

There are two basic problems with writing humor:
1 - The English language was designed to be spoken, it was created by a largely illiterate population and the written form is largely devoid of methods to express inflection. Inflection is the way, when speaking, of indicating sarcasm and irony.
2 - The setting, if people are expecting humor they can see it even if written, but if they aren't they don't assume and insert the inflections. Because this is mostly a serious website people are not expecting humor. Now once people get to know you they'll learn your tone (like one_particular_harbor and stonecoldGOP, it's pretty easy to tell when they're being serious and when they're being funny but that ease stems from familiarity) and you'll have less problems. But you'll still have to watch the topic, no level of over the top can ever be assumed to be funny on any of the so called tinfoil threads, largely because no level of over the top can exceed what some people on those threads actually think.

One good thing is to develop keys, Hunter S Thompson does that, whenever he says he can't believe he's writing this that means he's making stuff up. I tend to use "then, of course" to segue into a chunk of humor, usually as the last sentence of a paragraph with serious points to break tension. If you're going to make posts that are entirely humorous keep them short, one or two lines, the more you write the more it seems like you're being serious. In the end I'd say do some searches for OPH, SCGOP, Silly and PJComix, these seme to be the guys that are most successful at being funny on FR and you can probably pick up good tips just from their style (especially PJ who really excels at the deadpan gotcha style of humor, I'm onto him and he still gets me sometimes).

The thought that this product will be successful thoroughly confuses me as well. It has such a limited use, and provides little functionality.

Yes..........from my very limited understanding of standard MBA-type practices one of the things that is usually done with a new product is some sort of "Marketing" analysis (ie. to answer the questions: "What is the Market?", "How may can we sell?", "How much money should we invest, therefore, in manufacturing facilities to produce a given number of units given a certain-sized Market?").

One can conclude from the hoopla that this has been done when Kamen said "this device will replace the automobile" (snicker, snicker). If so, then he has been seriously misled by the marketing firm that he hired to perform this service and should get his money back.

I agree with you.........."scooters" already exist, and if you want an enclosed vehicle with a little bit of carrying capacity, with great gas-mileage then Smart (Chrysler subsidiary) already manufactures this product for a European "market". I'm likewise completely mystified as to what the "Market" is for this product in the US.

You guys are good. As I wrote and reread the sentence I thought to myself: that's got to be run on sentence. Said what the heck, I feel it gets my point across and it's my last post to the thread anyhow so screw it, I'm posting it that way. Hey, I knew what I was doing and did it. See how easy that is, Red. More important and on topic for our discussion than pointing out the structural error, if you don't understand what the sentence you quoted meant then you can blame me, the writer, for lack of clarity.

Its called a "Segway." Neat. Yawn.

Yeah, just what we need...a wheelchair for the non-disabled. What'll they think of next? A hearing aid for the non-deaf?

A "better mousetrap" it ain't...

I suppose those of us not lazy enough to use one of these will be expected to move out of the way for those who are.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.