There is a major difference. The wholesale government surveillance of the Internet, the ramp up of government drones, and the government "video surveillance state" comes down to one thing:
It is now cost effective for governments to micromanage EVERYONE'S life.
If you you don't recognize that this is the most dangerous thing that has happened to liberty and civilization in general you aren't awake. If they felt that this person was dangerous enough that they were willing to pay for a manned 24/7 stakeout then that has already introduced a massive self limiting level of restraint on the process. Popping something on a pole for a cost that is less then one day's wages and then letting it mop up anything is not remotely like a stakeout.
Be very clear about this: A government is a hierarchy. A hierarchy is just an organizational construct. By definition a hierarchy CANNOT HAVE A MORAL CONSCIOUS!. Only an individual can be moral. The basic drives and influences of a person in a hierarchy is not remotely focused on exercising morality. It is focused on power dynamics of having someone above you and someone below you. (Not a great way to exercise "morality" ehh?!)
Always remember: If you had a teenaged child with the same fiscal responsibility and penchant for dancing around the truth as ANY government you would ground them for life.
(And I have to listen to people who want to give up MY rights because they believe an organization chart called "government" will magically take care of things for them. Shheeeshh!!!)
All of this is missing a major point about the posted article: - Is this news or a posted question to the readers?
Everyone knows that IT has become a huge house of cards and it isn't possible to give a real solid level of protection while using modern features and technology. The comments echo this fact.
So where is the news and/or where is the useful question?
---------------
SlashDot should be so much better then this.
Smart isn't what we get. It will be "Smart assed". As in: I wonder how long before we get some kid trying out different fireworks to see which one brings out the SWAT team?!
I suspect the system isn't looking for a "supersonic" signature as a pretty common setup is a pistol with subsonic rounds. (45 ACP)
So time to break out your crossbows or just go "full boat Hunger Games" on them!
What makes you think your "perfect fit" could get past the HR barricade?
There was a situation widely reported a couple years ago where a company was looking for a software engineer. They ran the 25,000+ resumes they recieved through their resume vetting service and found "they didn't have a single qualified applicant"! The internet and blind application of something they call "best practices" has made them stupid. Anytime you automate a human ability the humans will lose that ability. Your cell phone has a contact list right? 20+ years ago the average competent adult had at least 20 phone numbers memorized (maybe more like 50). Now it is rare to find someone who knows more then 5 numbers. The exact same thing happened to HR. They saw easy resume vetting services and laziness and eagerness for the "next big thing" has now made them stupid and they don't even realize they are running an incompetent process.
A little secret for HR types: 95% of the people doing IT as a career are "members of the B team" and you can't tell the difference from the resume from an "A team" type. The difference isn't training or certifications. (Except that the A-Team guy likely doesn't have certifications. He was working.) The difference is the thought process inside their head. How does that person solve problems?
The list of certifications that they put on a job posting is ridiculous. Demanding certifications almost guarantees that you will get a lower level of experience and a less desirable employee. Why? The technologies that we are working with change year to year. An excellent IT tech will pick the new tech up on the fly, and he will pickup the one following that, and following that, ad infinitum. As mentioned before he won't get a certification for that new tech because he is on that endless treadmill WORKING! Almost every tech I've run across with any level of certification was absolute junk. They say the right words but they never see straight to the heart of an issue.
An extremely important fact will be impossible to explain to anyone but a good IT person". It is impossible for anyone but a really good IT person to determine if another IT person is truly qualified. And even that might take a bit as the results of their work are often the only arbiter.
Saying "cities" is a real push. The only real city in the US with a larger area is Anchorage Alaska. (I guess Juneau is considered a city as it is the capital but if you go there it is really just a town with politicians and extra land.)
... The statute, outlawing the provision of “material support” to designated terrorist organizations, does not violate free-speech and free-association protections of the First Amendment, and it is not unconstitutionally vague, the majority justices declared...
That doesn't come close to addressing encryption, warrants, or search and seizure. What The Hell?
I'm wondering if there is an official guideline that the administration has to spin anything into a child safety issue. "Just follow this simple flow chart before releasing to the press."
The whole "safety, safety, safety" bit has gotten so ridiculous and I am endlessly surprised by the fact that a majority of people haven't cried "bullshit" on it. We are in the safest time in history. The thing that has changed is that a single instance of some wack job doing something crazy is blasted out of every media channel and people believe that it is a credible threat. (That explains lottery ticket sales.)
Reality check: When you have 300,000,000+ people in a country every single day there are going to be a multi digit number of them that do something so horrendous as to drop your jaw. That doesn't make it a credible threat. Hell, if you were actually on a US domestic flight on Sept 11th 2001 you would have only have a 1 in 10,000 chance of being on a doomed flight. We aren't at a credible level of risk beyond your chance of slipping in the shower or down the stairs.
The government IS NOT a responsible agency to be given the master keys to your life (or even a valet key!). If you had a teenage child with the same level of fiscal responsibility and the same way of dancing around the truth, you would ground them for life.
Yeah, I will take a.00000001% increase in risk in exchange for.1% increase in safety from being screwed with by a government agency.
- First solution would be to use a Windows thin client. Set it up, write the configuration to flash and then lock it. If it goes BOOM just turn it off and turn it back on and it will be exactly the same as it was. Mail will have to be on the web because nothing will be saved locally.
- Second idea would be to use a terminal server / remote desktop. Give them just enough to log into a system that you maintain at your location. Make sure there are no visible links to a web browser (or anything else) on their local computer.
----------
One thing people should tell their parents/grandparents/non-techie friends, "Anything fun, cool, and/or free on the web is inherently dangerous. If you can't tell how they are making money then you should suspect everything you see."
Yup. That is it. He holds U.S. and international patents which they have blatantly ignored and his legal challenge was met with lawyers that basically made it into $ vs $$$$ and $$$$ wins.
(Told him he should find a high end patent attorney to take the case on contingency. He is so fed up with attorneys that he would rather shoot the next one he sees rather then talk to one more. He says he will never patent another thing.)
I know a guy that has patents for a wheel centercap that always shows the car's emblem upright. Basically it has a weight and bearings to insure that it doesn't turn with the wheel. Kind of cool item for anal car nuts. He also holds international patents for the same.
Some time after he started producing center caps for the aftermarket Rolls Royce starts putting the same type of non rotating center caps on their cars. His attorney approached them and tried to pursue getting some type of licensing, damages, or cease and desist, and ended up out his considerable attorney fees.
So to the question of "Are many companies stupid enough to willingly infringe patents?...
Uhhh, yeah. Pretty much all of them.
Amazingly, pretty much nothing about people's income has kept pace with the cost of living during the last 30 years. And they are wondering why less people are flying airplanes?
It isn't that income has kept pace. The problem is that the cost of product liability insurance has risen to the point where what was a $15,000 plane in the 50s would be a $350,000+ plane now days.
Too bad that it hasn't reached the point where the attorneys have been crushed under the weight of the $$$ that they have skimmed off the general economy.
Heinlein's Starship Troopers is a masterful morality play. The movie can only be seen as such by someone desperately searching for meaning that isn't really there. The fun technical wizardry of the jump suits was written out of it so the obvious CG element was lost..
So why did they bother to call it Starship Troopers? A fun movie but no trace of what was special in the original remains.
Why is it that people get this Pollyanna idea that a meaningful percentage of government spending goes to actually accomplishing meaningful expenditures such as, "building and maintaining roads and bridges"?
The vast, vast, VAST majority of spending goes to administration. Most of that "administration" is used to administrate other administrators. The quantity of money that is used to accomplish ANYTHING by a government entity is nothing short of astounding.
A simple roadwork example: A public works engineer explained to me the cost of converting a simple 90 degree intersection of two 2-lane roads, from Stop signs to a traffic light. The bill for the studies, planning, engineering, purchasing, and installation?...
[... wait for it...]
Total cost was $250,000...
[... wait for it...]
in 1990 dollars.
People complain that schools don't have enough money. Bull! School districts get plenty of money but the quantity of administration has grown to the point where the majority of money goes to support the disproportionately large percentage of "administrators" who of course, because they are in positions of power, command higher salaries. And at the same time they don't actually educate a single child.
Think I'm exaggerating? Download the 2011-2012 report: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/fd/ec/currentexpense.asp
Column "F" is the dollars that are spent annually per student. The statewide calculation works out to $8382 (cell F962). Figure a small average class size of 20 children and that works out to $167640. For that kind of money don't you think you could hire a well paid teacher, get a great building, fill the classroom with new books each year, buy cheap desks every few years, have a part time assistant, pay the electric bill, and in the end make one hell of a profit? Then to add to it, instead of just doing one room of 20 kids, do 20 rooms of 20 kids. If you couldn't siphon off an astounding quantity of money while vastly improving the service you aren't trying.
Well an astounding quantity of money IS being siphoned off by extraneous administration (which describes most of government). And it isn't providing anything to justify the burden to the taxpayer.
In reality class sizes are more like 30+ children ($251460) so we are really being bilked. BTW - This isn't hard to see if you are looking. I haven't been studying this or working in the industry. I found and calculated ALL of these numbers while I was writing this post so it isn't hard to figure out and see that we are being used.
Don't bet on it. The only thing the government is less likely let go of once they have it in their hands, than power, is money.
. ..
Let's be very clear on this: Money IS Power.
This is not a figure of speech. Exactly what is money? You can define it by what it looks like and what we use it for but that dances around the simple truth: Money is numerical denomination of power.
If I have two simoleons I can convince someone to give me twice as much of something then if I have just offer just one. That "something" may be physical goods, time, or labor.
Money is a physical representation of power.
So you don't think the fact that the carbon from fossil fuels is way underground has some sort of effect? Say like, keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere?
Where does the carbon come from when you are "Using bugs to create more fossil fuels"? Are you expecting microbial alchemy?
So if someone does get a scheme that does a good job of making hydrocarbons using microbes what do you think the effect of pumping surplus back into the ground?
Swapping batteries is technically possible but that doesn't make it less dumb. EVs of the last few years can do an 80% quick charge in half an hour. The only way to make charging an EV take 12 hours would be to try to do a full charge on a high-capacity model from a 110v socket.
But what makes it dumb most of all is that it requires long-term planning and sacrifice to solve a very short-term problem. Batteries are already good enough for most uses, and as capacity goes up the swappable battery infrastructure makes less and less sense. In 20 years it will seem as silly as having an F1-like quick tire change setup on every car and a pit crew with pre-heated tires in every gas station.
So your "obvious" solution is to queue up cars to wait their turn (for god knows how long) so they can sit in a place that they don't want to be for half an hour? You must not have anything you do with your time. Let's just ignore the part about repeated fast charging damaging the battery and voiding the warrenty.
You have no reason to charge the CAR. You only have a reason to charge the BATTERY. Keeping the car there is silly. Even more naive is to give the requirement for "long-term planning and sacrifice" as a reason it shouldn't be done. ALL energy infrastructure requires long term planning. The current gasoline distribution infrastructure takes an amazing quantity of planning that is quite detailed for more then a decade into the future.
As far as sacrifice... Does it really have to be spelled out for you? What do you think you are paying for? If it is really hard and requires "sacrifice" you get to charge a price for it. Whole industries have risen on the idea that a company can do the difficult work so the consumer has to do none. (Really the "sacrifice" comment is the dumbest thing you have said. Don't advertise stupidity.)
BTW - I did notice that you ignored that fact that battery swaps have already been embraced by one manufacturer because the consumer public needs the service.
About the power companies, isn't that supply and demand thing supposed to work? When the power cuts out the power companies aren't making money.
Well it hasn't solved the current problem where the grid can't handle the seasonal highs that are expected every year. So why hasn't your "obvious" solution panned out every year? (Maybe the problem is that it requires "long-term planning and sacrifice" to build and improve an electric grid.)
A simple look at what consumers are willing to put up with will tell you that you have less then 5 minutes to get the vehicle full of energy. You can pump it in as gasoline, you can pump it in as hydrogen, you can get it in as charged batteries. If the person has to wait more then 5 minutes they will never go for it. That leaves you with a choice of gasoline power, fuel cell power, or swappable batteries.
I am going to be driving over 2000 miles in the next week. I will enjoy the fact that I WILL NOT be sitting for 10+ hours during that time doing 20+ "fast charges". I will also enjoy the fact that you have no part in the long term planning and sacrifice of our nation's energy infrastructure.
Swappable batteries are dumb because everyone will go for 12+ hour charges every couple hundred miles? Really?? I guess we will no longer have interstate freeways...
Batteries are just a commodity. You can buy a propane bottle based on exchange of the bottle and you think it is impossible to buy a battery based on exchange. How about a 30 second idea on how it can work from someone who isn't even connected to the industry: You pay for a battery that is good for 1000 charges. For the next 1000 exchanges you only pay for the cost of the energy to charge it and the swap fee at the service station.
A battery is a box that holds power. It is easy to design modular boxes that can be swapped in and out. Instead of a D cell have a Z cell. A sub compact takes, say, 12 of them. A minivan takes maybe 20. That's technically impossible?
Yeah, impossible crazy idea and they will never do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlaQuKk9bFg
(The only problem with the Tesla solution is it is brand/model specific.)
So what is your economic incentive to get power company share holders to invest to add additional reserve to the power system when we can't get enough power into large metropolitan areas to begin with? Hoping real hard? Blankly saying that "in the future the grid can be improved" is planning based on fantasy. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/08/28/0325237/us-electrical-grid-on-the-edge-of-failure
Sure, because the electric power grid is so bullet proof and under utilized.
If electric cars (as currently imagined) were a good idea you wouldn't have phrases like "rolling blackouts" and they would have learned a basic concept that every RC car guy learned a couple decades ago called "swappable batteries".
My question is: In a time where everyone is screaming, "Green!!!", why is every little object packaged in a large plastic case 10 times the size of the little object?
Not only is it an obvious waste, it is incredibly irritating to have to break out tools to extract a purchase.
Funny experience was watching a person at an airport wrestle with a sealed package with a bluetooth headset inside. (Of course no one has anything sharp because the only good human is a helpless one) They ended up cutting their hand on the packaging before they got it open.
!!! Wait!!! Doesn't that mean that plastic packaging should be banned from airports as it can obviously cut someone?
Slashdot Mirror
There is a major difference. The wholesale government surveillance of the Internet, the ramp up of government drones, and the government "video surveillance state" comes down to one thing:
It is now cost effective for governments to micromanage EVERYONE'S life.
If you you don't recognize that this is the most dangerous thing that has happened to liberty and civilization in general you aren't awake. If they felt that this person was dangerous enough that they were willing to pay for a manned 24/7 stakeout then that has already introduced a massive self limiting level of restraint on the process. Popping something on a pole for a cost that is less then one day's wages and then letting it mop up anything is not remotely like a stakeout.
Be very clear about this: A government is a hierarchy. A hierarchy is just an organizational construct. By definition a hierarchy CANNOT HAVE A MORAL CONSCIOUS!. Only an individual can be moral. The basic drives and influences of a person in a hierarchy is not remotely focused on exercising morality. It is focused on power dynamics of having someone above you and someone below you. (Not a great way to exercise "morality" ehh?!)
Always remember: If you had a teenaged child with the same fiscal responsibility and penchant for dancing around the truth as ANY government you would ground them for life.
(And I have to listen to people who want to give up MY rights because they believe an organization chart called "government" will magically take care of things for them. Shheeeshh!!!)
All of this is missing a major point about the posted article:
- Is this news or a posted question to the readers?
Everyone knows that IT has become a huge house of cards and it isn't possible to give a real solid level of protection while using modern features and technology. The comments echo this fact.
So where is the news and/or where is the useful question?
---------------
SlashDot should be so much better then this.
Smart isn't what we get. It will be "Smart assed". As in: I wonder how long before we get some kid trying out different fireworks to see which one brings out the SWAT team?!
I suspect the system isn't looking for a "supersonic" signature as a pretty common setup is a pistol with subsonic rounds. (45 ACP)
So time to break out your crossbows or just go "full boat Hunger Games" on them!
What makes you think your "perfect fit" could get past the HR barricade?
There was a situation widely reported a couple years ago where a company was looking for a software engineer. They ran the 25,000+ resumes they recieved through their resume vetting service and found "they didn't have a single qualified applicant"! The internet and blind application of something they call "best practices" has made them stupid.
Anytime you automate a human ability the humans will lose that ability. Your cell phone has a contact list right? 20+ years ago the average competent adult had at least 20 phone numbers memorized (maybe more like 50). Now it is rare to find someone who knows more then 5 numbers. The exact same thing happened to HR. They saw easy resume vetting services and laziness and eagerness for the "next big thing" has now made them stupid and they don't even realize they are running an incompetent process.
A little secret for HR types: 95% of the people doing IT as a career are "members of the B team" and you can't tell the difference from the resume from an "A team" type. The difference isn't training or certifications. (Except that the A-Team guy likely doesn't have certifications. He was working.) The difference is the thought process inside their head. How does that person solve problems?
The list of certifications that they put on a job posting is ridiculous. Demanding certifications almost guarantees that you will get a lower level of experience and a less desirable employee. Why? The technologies that we are working with change year to year. An excellent IT tech will pick the new tech up on the fly, and he will pickup the one following that, and following that, ad infinitum. As mentioned before he won't get a certification for that new tech because he is on that endless treadmill WORKING! Almost every tech I've run across with any level of certification was absolute junk. They say the right words but they never see straight to the heart of an issue.
An extremely important fact will be impossible to explain to anyone but a good IT person". It is impossible for anyone but a really good IT person to determine if another IT person is truly qualified. And even that might take a bit as the results of their work are often the only arbiter.
Saying "cities" is a real push. The only real city in the US with a larger area is Anchorage Alaska. (I guess Juneau is considered a city as it is the capital but if you go there it is really just a town with politicians and extra land.)
...
The statute, outlawing the provision of “material support” to designated terrorist organizations, does not violate free-speech and free-association protections of the First Amendment, and it is not unconstitutionally vague, the majority justices declared...
That doesn't come close to addressing encryption, warrants, or search and seizure. What The Hell?
Excellent point. I did a search on the definition of terrorism and found this FBI page: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/in...
The first bullet point of the domestic section reads: - "Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law"
News flash! Base jumping is accurately described as domestic terrorism. Good to know!
I'm wondering if there is an official guideline that the administration has to spin anything into a child safety issue. "Just follow this simple flow chart before releasing to the press."
.00000001% increase in risk in exchange for .1% increase in safety from being screwed with by a government agency.
The whole "safety, safety, safety" bit has gotten so ridiculous and I am endlessly surprised by the fact that a majority of people haven't cried "bullshit" on it. We are in the safest time in history. The thing that has changed is that a single instance of some wack job doing something crazy is blasted out of every media channel and people believe that it is a credible threat. (That explains lottery ticket sales.)
Reality check: When you have 300,000,000+ people in a country every single day there are going to be a multi digit number of them that do something so horrendous as to drop your jaw. That doesn't make it a credible threat. Hell, if you were actually on a US domestic flight on Sept 11th 2001 you would have only have a 1 in 10,000 chance of being on a doomed flight. We aren't at a credible level of risk beyond your chance of slipping in the shower or down the stairs.
The government IS NOT a responsible agency to be given the master keys to your life (or even a valet key!). If you had a teenage child with the same level of fiscal responsibility and the same way of dancing around the truth, you would ground them for life.
Yeah, I will take a
- First solution would be to use a Windows thin client. Set it up, write the configuration to flash and then lock it. If it goes BOOM just turn it off and turn it back on and it will be exactly the same as it was. Mail will have to be on the web because nothing will be saved locally.
- Second idea would be to use a terminal server / remote desktop. Give them just enough to log into a system that you maintain at your location. Make sure there are no visible links to a web browser (or anything else) on their local computer.
----------
One thing people should tell their parents/grandparents/non-techie friends, "Anything fun, cool, and/or free on the web is inherently dangerous. If you can't tell how they are making money then you should suspect everything you see."
Yup. That is it. He holds U.S. and international patents which they have blatantly ignored and his legal challenge was met with lawyers that basically made it into $ vs $$$$ and $$$$ wins.
(Told him he should find a high end patent attorney to take the case on contingency. He is so fed up with attorneys that he would rather shoot the next one he sees rather then talk to one more. He says he will never patent another thing.)
I know a guy that has patents for a wheel centercap that always shows the car's emblem upright. Basically it has a weight and bearings to insure that it doesn't turn with the wheel. Kind of cool item for anal car nuts. He also holds international patents for the same.
...
Some time after he started producing center caps for the aftermarket Rolls Royce starts putting the same type of non rotating center caps on their cars. His attorney approached them and tried to pursue getting some type of licensing, damages, or cease and desist, and ended up out his considerable attorney fees.
So to the question of "Are many companies stupid enough to willingly infringe patents?
Uhhh, yeah. Pretty much all of them.
Bingo!
Handing children a device unsupervised, that can access anything is more of the issue.
You don't watch TV do you?
Politicians, reality show 'stars', entertainment reporters, etc...
Basically TV's basic function is to glorify clowns.
Amazingly, pretty much nothing about people's income has kept pace with the cost of living during the last 30 years. And they are wondering why less people are flying airplanes?
It isn't that income has kept pace. The problem is that the cost of product liability insurance has risen to the point where what was a $15,000 plane in the 50s would be a $350,000+ plane now days.
Too bad that it hasn't reached the point where the attorneys have been crushed under the weight of the $$$ that they have skimmed off the general economy.
Where is "-1 Moron" when you really need it?
http://archive09.linux.com/feature/59196
Google solves everything!
Heinlein's Starship Troopers is a masterful morality play. The movie can only be seen as such by someone desperately searching for meaning that isn't really there. The fun technical wizardry of the jump suits was written out of it so the obvious CG element was lost..
So why did they bother to call it Starship Troopers? A fun movie but no trace of what was special in the original remains.
Why is it that people get this Pollyanna idea that a meaningful percentage of government spending goes to actually accomplishing meaningful expenditures such as, "building and maintaining roads and bridges"?
... ...] ... ...]
The vast, vast, VAST majority of spending goes to administration. Most of that "administration" is used to administrate other administrators. The quantity of money that is used to accomplish ANYTHING by a government entity is nothing short of astounding.
A simple roadwork example: A public works engineer explained to me the cost of converting a simple 90 degree intersection of two 2-lane roads, from Stop signs to a traffic light. The bill for the studies, planning, engineering, purchasing, and installation?
[... wait for it
Total cost was $250,000
[... wait for it
in 1990 dollars.
People complain that schools don't have enough money. Bull! School districts get plenty of money but the quantity of administration has grown to the point where the majority of money goes to support the disproportionately large percentage of "administrators" who of course, because they are in positions of power, command higher salaries. And at the same time they don't actually educate a single child.
Think I'm exaggerating? Download the 2011-2012 report: http://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/fd/ec/currentexpense.asp
Column "F" is the dollars that are spent annually per student. The statewide calculation works out to $8382 (cell F962). Figure a small average class size of 20 children and that works out to $167640. For that kind of money don't you think you could hire a well paid teacher, get a great building, fill the classroom with new books each year, buy cheap desks every few years, have a part time assistant, pay the electric bill, and in the end make one hell of a profit? Then to add to it, instead of just doing one room of 20 kids, do 20 rooms of 20 kids. If you couldn't siphon off an astounding quantity of money while vastly improving the service you aren't trying.
Well an astounding quantity of money IS being siphoned off by extraneous administration (which describes most of government). And it isn't providing anything to justify the burden to the taxpayer.
In reality class sizes are more like 30+ children ($251460) so we are really being bilked. BTW - This isn't hard to see if you are looking. I haven't been studying this or working in the industry. I found and calculated ALL of these numbers while I was writing this post so it isn't hard to figure out and see that we are being used.
. . .
Don't bet on it. The only thing the government is less likely let go of once they have it in their hands, than power, is money.
. . .
Let's be very clear on this: Money IS Power.
This is not a figure of speech. Exactly what is money? You can define it by what it looks like and what we use it for but that dances around the simple truth:
Money is numerical denomination of power. If I have two simoleons I can convince someone to give me twice as much of something then if I have just offer just one. That "something" may be physical goods, time, or labor.
Money is a physical representation of power.
So you don't think the fact that the carbon from fossil fuels is way underground has some sort of effect? Say like, keeping that carbon out of the atmosphere?
Where does the carbon come from when you are "Using bugs to create more fossil fuels"? Are you expecting microbial alchemy?
So if someone does get a scheme that does a good job of making hydrocarbons using microbes what do you think the effect of pumping surplus back into the ground?
Swapping batteries is technically possible but that doesn't make it less dumb. EVs of the last few years can do an 80% quick charge in half an hour. The only way to make charging an EV take 12 hours would be to try to do a full charge on a high-capacity model from a 110v socket.
But what makes it dumb most of all is that it requires long-term planning and sacrifice to solve a very short-term problem. Batteries are already good enough for most uses, and as capacity goes up the swappable battery infrastructure makes less and less sense. In 20 years it will seem as silly as having an F1-like quick tire change setup on every car and a pit crew with pre-heated tires in every gas station.
So your "obvious" solution is to queue up cars to wait their turn (for god knows how long) so they can sit in a place that they don't want to be for half an hour? You must not have anything you do with your time. Let's just ignore the part about repeated fast charging damaging the battery and voiding the warrenty.
You have no reason to charge the CAR. You only have a reason to charge the BATTERY. Keeping the car there is silly. Even more naive is to give the requirement for "long-term planning and sacrifice" as a reason it shouldn't be done. ALL energy infrastructure requires long term planning. The current gasoline distribution infrastructure takes an amazing quantity of planning that is quite detailed for more then a decade into the future.
As far as sacrifice... Does it really have to be spelled out for you? What do you think you are paying for? If it is really hard and requires "sacrifice" you get to charge a price for it. Whole industries have risen on the idea that a company can do the difficult work so the consumer has to do none. (Really the "sacrifice" comment is the dumbest thing you have said. Don't advertise stupidity.)
BTW - I did notice that you ignored that fact that battery swaps have already been embraced by one manufacturer because the consumer public needs the service.
About the power companies, isn't that supply and demand thing supposed to work? When the power cuts out the power companies aren't making money.
Well it hasn't solved the current problem where the grid can't handle the seasonal highs that are expected every year. So why hasn't your "obvious" solution panned out every year? (Maybe the problem is that it requires "long-term planning and sacrifice" to build and improve an electric grid.)
A simple look at what consumers are willing to put up with will tell you that you have less then 5 minutes to get the vehicle full of energy. You can pump it in as gasoline, you can pump it in as hydrogen, you can get it in as charged batteries. If the person has to wait more then 5 minutes they will never go for it. That leaves you with a choice of gasoline power, fuel cell power, or swappable batteries.
I am going to be driving over 2000 miles in the next week. I will enjoy the fact that I WILL NOT be sitting for 10+ hours during that time doing 20+ "fast charges". I will also enjoy the fact that you have no part in the long term planning and sacrifice of our nation's energy infrastructure.
Swappable batteries are dumb because everyone will go for 12+ hour charges every couple hundred miles? Really?? I guess we will no longer have interstate freeways...
Batteries are just a commodity. You can buy a propane bottle based on exchange of the bottle and you think it is impossible to buy a battery based on exchange. How about a 30 second idea on how it can work from someone who isn't even connected to the industry: You pay for a battery that is good for 1000 charges. For the next 1000 exchanges you only pay for the cost of the energy to charge it and the swap fee at the service station.
A battery is a box that holds power. It is easy to design modular boxes that can be swapped in and out. Instead of a D cell have a Z cell. A sub compact takes, say, 12 of them. A minivan takes maybe 20. That's technically impossible?
Yeah, impossible crazy idea and they will never do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlaQuKk9bFg
(The only problem with the Tesla solution is it is brand/model specific.)
So what is your economic incentive to get power company share holders to invest to add additional reserve to the power system when we can't get enough power into large metropolitan areas to begin with? Hoping real hard? Blankly saying that "in the future the grid can be improved" is planning based on fantasy.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/08/28/0325237/us-electrical-grid-on-the-edge-of-failure
Sure, because the electric power grid is so bullet proof and under utilized.
If electric cars (as currently imagined) were a good idea you wouldn't have phrases like "rolling blackouts" and they would have learned a basic concept that every RC car guy learned a couple decades ago called "swappable batteries".
My question is: In a time where everyone is screaming, "Green!!!", why is every little object packaged in a large plastic case 10 times the size of the little object?
Not only is it an obvious waste, it is incredibly irritating to have to break out tools to extract a purchase.
Funny experience was watching a person at an airport wrestle with a sealed package with a bluetooth headset inside. (Of course no one has anything sharp because the only good human is a helpless one) They ended up cutting their hand on the packaging before they got it open.
!!! Wait!!! Doesn't that mean that plastic packaging should be banned from airports as it can obviously cut someone?