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wrote in news:1151389317.659064.143990
@c74g2000cwc.googlegroups.com:

it seems tough that a special reader ($75) is needed to read the
Navionics Charts. Question a

The price of the software is embedded into the price of the reader, just
like that $79 printer sitting next to you that takes ink jet carts
costing $8000/gallon to run. They get their money, one way or the
other...(c;

1) Anyone tried this with just a Compact Flash reader
2) The Navionics descriptions states to not use it in a computer, it
may damage the data?
Is this true? Am I running a risk of loosing my charts when trying
this?

True, true. All we do is design the cart so that it trashes the charts
when it finds standard compact flash's power leads.

Automatic erase is designed into it so you cannot READ the chart off into
the computer to steal the cartographer's data you paid for with taxes
long ago. Same old NMEA story. Design it all proprietary so they have
no choice but to buy from ME and ME only. It's why they all use their
own proprietary bus structures and just pay lip service to NMEA0183 or
2000, another proprietary structure, itself. We wouldn't want you using
some non-member's TCP/IP router or html or Java would we?

How silly....

Oh, and let's not forget to re-design everything every couple of years to
make it completely incompatible with everything we made last year,
parcelling out the incompatible technology in little pieces so they can
replace EVERYTHING, not just the display unit, for fun and profit.