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Technology Stocks : VALENCE TECHNOLOGY (VLNC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: William Epstein who wrote (12588)	6/30/1999 7:42:00 PM
From: Rich Wolf	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 27311

Your anecdote is not viable here, Bill. The customers (OEMs) in this case would not be wanting to hold Valence back, only Valence's competitors. If Valence's product, which they've just shipped out, does what they say it does, the customers will use it and buy it. Then the shorts, professional or not, will be covering. It's that simple.

To: William Epstein who wrote (12588)	6/30/1999 8:41:00 PM
From: Eli74	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27311

I would question the validity of your story of the two engineers. If there truly was some kind of gizmo that was truly developed 25 or so years ago, and if that gizmo really enabled normal sized cars to get 80 MPG in the midst of the Arab oil embargo or its immediate aftermath, do you really think a major automotive company would have sat on the invention? If they had techonology of that kind back then, they could and would have put every other single automobile manufacturer out of business in about 3 years. Besides, if the device was really patented, wouldn't the patent protection have expired by now? And if it (i.e., the patent protection) had expired, then wouldn't it have been revived by those two engineers? I certainly have no way of knowing for sure, but that story sounds preposterous on the face of it. It seems to me that you're seeing spooks in the closet, Bill. Come one, turn on the lights and you'll see the monsters are really just piles of dirty socks. Eli74

To: William Epstein who wrote (12588)	6/30/1999 9:19:00 PM
From: Gordon Quickstad	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27311

I sincerely doubt your anecdote. This urban myth has been lurking ever since the 1973 - 74 fuel shortages. It is a well understand scientific problem of extracting chemical energy at well known efficiencies and applying it to the well known energy sinks present in automobiles. There is no mysticism available in the problem to support your belief of the anecdote.

To: William Epstein who wrote (12588)	7/1/1999 7:57:00 PM
From: Gordon Quickstad	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 27311

Off topic. Do you remember looking in J.C. Whitney catalogs of that era and seeing all the devices that claimed to improve gas mileage? I swear if you bought them all you would also have to buy a large tank to drain off the fuel that would be flowing OUT of your car from the accumulative benefit. I sorta liked the idea of electrical taping the cow magnet on the fuel line to align the gas molecules. The only devices that had a chance of working were the ones that had you advance your timing as the last step after installing the device. Just avoid steep hills on hot days! Why would Ford squelch an improvement that would sell enormous numbers of cars? If the engineers developed a device that saved half (you're saying a 4 to 7 times improvement) the fuel consumption in the free world, it would be worth far far more than 11 million bucks at that time. Those engineers are to be despised more than any corporation for being environmental criminals and incredibly dumb. Why haven't two more engineers come up with the same device; are we getting less advanced? And why would they build two prototype automobiles to demonstate a device that would give most cars of that time 80 - 140 MPG? PS - what's the patent number?