This Nicoll guy is a lively and interesting writer. His writing is opinionated (IMHO that's a plus). But he gets the facts of Starship Troopers unforgivably wrong.
Rico is a very young war criminal in scenes where the "demonstration of firepower and frightfulness" (heh: now, "shock and awe") includes toasting a church congregation of the "Skinnies" with his flamethrower
Nope. Some quotes from the book:
It was getting to be less healthy to be anywhere, even moving fast. [...] Nevertheless the home defenses were beginning to fight back, coordinated or not. I took a couple of near-misses with explosives [...] I was brushed by some sort of [paralysis] beam [...] Twice, jumping blind over buildings, I landed right in the middle of a group of them-- jumped at once while fanning wildly around me with the hand flamer.
A bit later:
tackled a wall in front of me with a knife beam at full power. A section of wall fell away and I charged in.
And backed out even faster.
I didn't know what it was I had cracked open. A congregation in church-- a skinny flophouse-- maybe even their defense headquarters. [...] Probably not a church, for somebody took a shot at me...
And he didn't use his flamer there; he dropped a bomb that squawked in the Skinny language: "I'm a thirty-second bomb! I'm a thirty-second bomb! Twenty-nine!... Twenty-eight!..." So the Skinnies present had a half-minute to flee the bomb.
The Skinnies were allies to the Bugs during the raid you are discussing. Thus, Humanity was in a state of war with both Bugs and Skinnies. Heinlein definitely remembered World War II where frightful amounts of ordnance was dropped on some cities that were important to the war effort, and I'm sure he wouldn't have hesitated to show the humans wiping out a whole city belonging to the Skinnies. But they didn't. Here's a relevant quote from the briefing before the raid:
"Our mission is to let the enemy know that we could have destroyed their city-- but didn't-- but that they aren't safe enven though we refrain from total bombing. You'll take no prisoners. You'll kill only when you can't help it. But the entire area we hit is to be smashed."
and looking for the town's water treatment plant with his micro-nuke. (After a 25-year career with the local waterworks, I know that's germ warfare...)
From the first chapter:
Right now I was trying to spot their waterworks; a direct hit on it could make the whole city uninhabitable, force them to evacuate it without directly killing anyone-- just the sort of nuisance we had been sent down to commit.
Would you and Nicoll have preferred they simply destroyed the whole city, killing everyone in it? I'm really having trouble grasping your objection to their using less-than-immediately-lethal force. Yes, I guess germs are one of the reasons the locals would have to leave their city if the waterworks was destroyed. And...?
The word "liebensraum" does come into the mind.
Nicoll claims this, and you seem to agree. You guys need to wash your minds out with soap. You just Godwined the discussion thread.
Hitler claimed that Germany had a right to expand because the non-Aryan races were weaker and deserved to be conquered. You just basically said Heinlein advocated the same thing.
In Starship Troopers Heinlein explicitly said that the Bugs attacked human-occupied planets first, starting the war; the attacks included Earth; and that as far as anyone could tell, the issue was that the Bugs "liked the same kind of planets we like" and the Bu
Heinlein had a contract to write one juvenile per year. He wrote Starship Troopers and sent it in as his juvenile for that year. The publisher freaked and refused to publish it. He took it to another publisher, who did publish it (and didn't call it a "juvenile") and Heinlein never returned to writing juveniles.
the entire conflict started with attacks by the bugs. The humans were never interested in occupying the bugs. They were interested in survival.
Absolutely correct.
Heinlein wanted to write a story with no moral ambiguity: the Bugs started the war, and humans had two choices: win, or die.
Ignoring the Bugs was not an option, or else all of humanity would have gone the way of Buenos Aires or any of the other places the Bugs destroyed in the novel.
The only ambiguity I remember in the novel was the scene where the protagonist mulled over the morality of capital punishment. A man had kidnapped and murdered a little girl; once he was found and arrested, he was executed by hanging. Johnny Rico wasn't sure that was morally correct, and spent several pages debating it with himself. In the end he decided that at least the murderer would never murder again, now, and he tabled the discussion so he could sleep. The book never returned to the topic.
Heinlein played a little bit of a trick with Johnny Rico. He didn't describe his appearance or give you many clues about his background, but then on the last page Johnny mentioned that at home his family speaks Tagalog; therefore he's Filipino. I'm 100% certain that this was a deliberate thing, Heinlein wanting to make sure that people were fans of the hero and then saying "by the way, he was a minority this whole time."
Heinlein depicted a military that was a pure meritocracy, and there was a cadet who was much sharper than Johnny Rico named Hassan; I don't think the novel ever said where he was from but he clearly was from the Middle East somewhere.
When Johnny started training there was a Japanese guy who was also starting training, and the sergeant was glad to have him and put him to work helping train the other recruits in unarmed combat. Keep in mind this book was published about 15 years after the end of World War II. Heinlein wrote a short story called "Water is for Washing" (published only two years after the end of World War II!) where a flood disaster threatened the protagonist; he wound up saving two children, one of whom was Japanese-American. When the protagonist first saw the boy, he said "That's a Jap!" The girl said "No, that's Tommy."
BTW Johnny Rico didn't live in Buenos Aires. When he heard that the Bugs had "smeared" Buenos Aires, he wasn't very upset; "gee, that's too bad" was about his response. Then later he found out his mother was visiting Buenos Aires when it was destroyed, and then he realized that it had touched him personally.
Heinlein was married to a woman who was smart and competent. (Virginia "Ginny" Heinlein) He wrote a number of smart and competent female characters. A lot of people have been hating on Heinlein because his later novels, which actually contained a nonzero amount of sex, had women who approved of sex.
When you look at Heinlein's actual record with his female characters, you can't call him sexist. In his future history, two brilliant scientists invented efficient solar panels; one of them was a woman and she was pulling her weight in the relationship. In "Jerry Was a Man" a main character is a rich woman, who is not super smart, but knows how to manage her businesses and takes no guff from anyone; and she had a trophy husband, and when he stepped out of line, she informed him that he was now exiting her life (it was not a discussion, she just told him how it was going to be). In "If This Goes On--" the male protagonist is not especially smart and has led a sheltered life, and he falls for a woman who is smarter and savvier than he in every way, and who has emotional scars from being sexually used by the dictator of their country. Oh, I could go on and on with examples.
Heinlein once, in an essay, proposed taking the vote away from men, at least for a while. It's hard to tell how serious he was with that suggestion. But to call him sexist against women is just silly.
The service was not necessarily hazardous. Johnny Rico's best friend was brilliant, and requested a job in a research lab, and got it. There was a war on, and the Bugs destroyed the lab (it wasn't on Earth, it was in space somewhere) so it turned out to be hazardous work. But in peacetime it would have been a non-hazardous posting.
There was a question in the book: What if a blind and deaf person wanted to serve? The answer: some kind of service would be found, even if it was makework like "counting the fuzz on a caterpillar by touch" (quote from memory). Nothing hazardous about that proposed makework.
Johnny Rico only applied for military jobs; in his opinion, if he couldn't get a military job, he didn't care where they sent him. Perhaps not everyone agreed with him.
The kicker, though: if you applied for service, they had to take you, but they didn't have to give you the posting you requested. Even if you applied to be a typist, they might put you in the army instead. So applying for service was effectively putting your life at risk. I'm only arguing that the fictional government didn't go out of its way to make every job hazardous; where they had non-hazardous jobs, people got posted to non-hazardous jobs.
P.S. In the canon of the book, women have superior math intuition compared to men, and thus women make the best starship pilots and all the pilots were women. Johnny Rico's female acquaintance applied as a pilot, and got it. Again, not much hazardous about such a job in peacetime.
Once honorably discharged from service a person now has the right to vote. They are free to vote in any manner they chose. The government will follow the majority of the voters. There is no fascist dictate from government. The enfranchised elite have "earned" the right to believe whatever they chose to in a political power sense, their majority has "earned" the right to direct the government. The voters are in control.
This. One thousand times this. Absolutely correct.
And, during the service, they didn't have the vote. This was to avoid moral hazard, such as government servants voting for more pay for government servants.
I got "1981" from Wikipedia. Re-reading, it doesn't specifically say that the actual Windows 1.0 codebase started in 1981, just that Microsoft "began developing a graphical user interface (GUI) in 1981."
I'll agree that what Microsoft was working on in 1981 probably got thrown away and didn't become part of Windows 1.0. However, I think my larger point stands, that Microsoft was working on a GUI long before the Mac came out, and didn't need to steal the Mac OS source code for their own project.
it wasn't fear, but greed that motivated Bill Gates in 1982
"Greed" is an emotionally-charged word but I basically agree. Gates wanted Microsoft to make a GUI, and he did want to make money by doing it.
without Microsoft working on software development for the new MacOS, they might not have developed Windows, in the above article Jeff Raikes attributes Bill Gates' conversion to believing in GUIs specifically to exposure to the MacOS.
Here's the relevant quote: "...I think at that point in time, you know, it really clicked with Bill that, you know, graphic user interface was going to be the way, the way of the future." I'm not sure what you think this proves. One guy says that in his opinion, "it really clicked" for Bill Gates that GUIs would be important. But at least if we believe Wikipedia, Microsoft was already working on a GUI. And according to Bill Gates he was a believer in GUI ever since he saw the computers at Xerox PARC.
What if Apple had done what Bill Gates asked and built and released a MacOS for PCs in 1985? Would there be no Windows?
In 1985, Windows was still a joke. If MacOS had been widely released, Microsoft would have given up on Windows and just accepted MacOS as the new standard. Microsoft made a lot of money selling Mac applications.
When the customers voted against OS/2 and for Windows, Microsoft accepted this reality; they walked away from OS/2 and started pushing Windows. If mass release of MacOS had happened, Microsoft would have accepted this reality, and focused on selling apps and making money that way.
Here's a Quora answer I wrote that includes my thoughts on a mass release of MacOS. My opinion hasn't changed since I wrote that.
Now that Windows is huge and important, Microsoft won't walk away from it. But back in the day when Windows was a joke, if MacOS had seen a mass release as a new standard, Microsoft would not have had any reason to keep trying to turn Windows into something good.
the point wasn't that they stole the entire code base and ran it as is.
Please provide some kind of evidence to support your theory that Microsoft stole and used actual code from Apple. Frankly when Apple was suing Microsoft, if Microsoft had actually stolen code, Apple would have added that to the lawsuit. But the Apple suit was over this nebulous concept of "look and feel", not over code theft.
Microsoft pre-empted the lawsuit, they told then CEO John Scully if he tried to sue they would stop development of Word and Excel for the Mac. Apple needed both of those applications because they were losing market share already. Then, to permanently stop any lawsuits over it, Microsoft offered to licence some of the Mac technologies.
And, after agreeing not to sue, Apple sued. And in that lawsuit they didn't say anything about code theft. Evidence or it didn't happen.
About "sabotaging OS/2"... I assumed that what you meant by "sabotage" was deliberately inserting malicious code while Microsoft was working on OS/2. Your link is an example of Microsoft people trash-talking OS/2, including a demo that a user-mode application could take
without Jobs working on MacOS, Gates and Microsoft wouldn't have been scared enough (or able to) steal the MacOS code to create Windows 1.0.
You're crazy and this is crazy talk. Microsoft started working on Windows 1.0 in 1981, before the Mac ever shipped. Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had seen demos of GUI computers at Xerox PARC and both determined that their respective companies should make GUI computing products. Microsoft fearing Apple was not in any way a factor. In 1981 the standard Apple computer was an Apple II with Microsoft BASIC and there was no adversarial relationship between the two companies, let alone fear.
The MacOS code wouldn't run on standard x86 hardware, and was a mix of Pascal and 68000 assembler. The MacOS code didn't have support for the crazy graphics cards people were running on x86 hardware in the late 80's. Windows 1.x was able to run on an 8088 chip, on top of DOS, so it was full of hacks to deal with the insane memory architecture needed for that. In short, even if Microsoft had stolen the code somehow, it wouldn't have done them any good; and I flatly don't believe that Microsoft stole any code. Apple never accused them of stealing code, and Apple was never shy.
It also means that OS/2 might actually have been finished earlier instead of being sabotaged by Microsoft.
I worked at Microsoft in the early 1990s and when I was hired, everyone expected OS/2 to be the future. I personally ported a bunch of utility programs so that they could run under OS/2 because we all were running OS/2 on our dev machines. (The utility programs were written in a DOS version of SNOBOL; I rewrote in Thompson AWK, which had a native OS/2 version.)
What happened to OS/2: customers voted with their dollars, and they voted for Windows. It didn't happen overnight... it took over 8 years for Microsoft to develop a Windows customers wanted. Windows 1.0 was a joke. Windows 2.0 became less of a joke (Jerry Pournelle at the time said something about Apple never needed to worry about Windows 1.x but ought to start worrying) but was still ugly and limited compared to a Mac. Windows 3.0 was a home run and flew off the shelves.
Windows 3.0 running on a 386 or higher could virtualize DOS apps, thus letting companies standardized on DOS apps run them side by side with each other and with native Windows apps; OS/2 at the time still had a single "compatibility box" for running one DOS app at a time. If you had a computer with a luxurious 4 MB of RAM, you could use all of that memory... Windows 3.0 was even better than DESQview.
Microsoft management decided to run with the product that the customers liked. They negotiated a "divorce" with IBM where IBM kept OS/2. The only "sabotage" Microsoft committed was to stop working on OS/2. If you want to claim otherwise, please provide some proof.
Now, Microsoft might have just stolen the OS/2 code, but that might have more difficult to do.
Microsoft helped write the OS/2 code. I'm sure they had plenty of copies of it. IBM never accused them of doing anything improper with their access to the code. And we have the same problem as with your idea that Microsoft stole Mac OS code: the OS/2 code is nothing like the Windows code. As an example, IBM insisted that the graphics coordinate system for OS/2 be different from Windows... IIRC the 0,0 pixel was in the upper-left of the window instead of lower-left, something like that. Microsoft tried to get IBM to agree to let OS/2 be more compatible with Windows so that it would be easier for companies to port apps to both. (Most companies at the time targeted OS/2 for app porting, since everyone expected that the IBM OS would ultimately win. Microsoft covered all the bets, porting their apps to both Windows and OS/2, so when Windows took off Microsoft had their apps ready to sell.) As another example, Windows used cooperative multitasking, except on a 386 or above where it used 386 features; OS/2 at the time used 286 Protect Mo
investors are confident their investment will yield exponential returns from some new tech we havent seen or current/old tech we haven't seen utilized in a new way
It could also be that investors are betting that Tesla is going to make it big on first-mover advantage and network effect.
Right now, all the electric cars are great second cars. For short trips around town, commuting to work, etc. a Nissan Leaf is great. But if you want to take a long road trip for any reason, you aren't taking that Nissan Leaf. You use your gasoline car.
All the electric cars, except Tesla. Tesla's Supercharger network is something that they have paid huge money to put together, and it means that you really can have just a Tesla as your only car. Long road trips? Just stop at a Supercharger and eat a snack or something while your car charges.
Only Tesla has the Supercharger network and cars that can use it. With any other brand of car, charging will take at least twice as long.
Assuming that Tesla can get their production line running smoothly for the Model 3, they can sell a lot of cars each year. And they are going to make money on each of those cars.
Right now, Tesla is losing lots of money, but it's not being wasted. They invested in R&D to develop the new Model 3, the new Semi, and the new sports car. They invested in equipment to make the Model 3. They invested in their own battery factory so they can get the lowest cost on batteries.
So the best possible scenario for Tesla: they get the Model 3 production line flowing and sell nearly half a million cars in 2018, and by 2019 or 2020 they are all caught up on back orders and selling over half a million Model 3s each year. They make a lot of money per car due to low cost on the batteries. All those cars use the Tesla Supercharger network, and lots of friends and family of Tesla owners get rides in the new cars and decide they want Teslas also, leading to more orders for Model 3s. Then they start selling lots of Semis, they finish the Model Y and sell lots of those, and they wind up owning a large chunk of the battery electric vehicle market. People start buying Teslas because they are confident in the charging network, and Tesla can afford to build out the charging network even more because they are now finally making money, and it snowballs. Then one or more factories in Europe come on line, making batteries and cars, and Tesla starts selling over a million cars per year. And the factory in Shanghai comes on line and they sell even more. Where does it end? Could Tesla grow to be the size of Honda?
Note that nothing in that scenario assumes new tech we haven't seen, or really even old tech we haven't seen utilized in a new way. It just assumes that Tesla wins big by being the first company to get volumes up and costs down enough to really sell a battery electric vehicle at a price people can afford. Plus Tesla wins in the Semi space by being the first company with a viable product.
Tesla also has a fairly wild plan, where they finish the full (level 5) self-driving features; they get legal approval for the cars to drive around on their own; and Tesla owners can opt-in to have their cars driving in an Uber-like carsharing service called Tesla Network. Imagine people have their cars drive them to work. Then, while they are at work, their cars join themselves to the service, and drive around picking people up and dropping them off; the people get paid for the trips their cars make, and then when it's time for them to go home for the day their cars automatically release themselves from the service and go to pick them up and drive them home. Thus a l
I live in Washington state, and when I pay my annual registration fee I also have to pay an "Electric Vehicle Tax" of $200. I estimate that this is equal to about 10 months of the gasoline tax on my previous car (with the amount of driving I do). People who drive more than I do would have a bigger difference.
I predict that any state that is worried about the loss of gasoline tax will simply enact new taxes, as Washington state did.
the cost for an EV will probably never come down to a parity with ICE cars
Most experts think that once the cost of a battery comes down, battery electric vehicles will cost less than ICE vehicles. Some people are claiming that BEVs are already cheaper than ICEVs if you take total cost of ownership into account.
I have seen several people repeating the claim that when lithium batteries for cars drop below $100 per kilowatt-hour, BEVs will cost less than ICEVs and consumers will start switching to them to save money. Elon Musk has in the past said that 2020 could be the year this happens. (For Tesla, anyway, since Tesla built its own battery factory just to get the lowest cost on batteries.)
the only hope is for some type of battery that does not involve lithium
I'll bet you that BEVs will boom in the next few years, still using lithium batteries. The high price of lithium is sending a signal to the free market, and as a result more development of lithium resources is happening. If prices are high enough, lithium and other metals can be recovered from sea water, and we aren't running out of sea water anytime soon. Also, we haven't really started recycling lithium car batteries yet, but that's coming too.
According to this article a Tesla Model S only needs 15 pounds / 7 kg of lithium, about as much as a bowling ball; and experts think that just the lithium available from mining would be enough for 185 years.
Tons of research is going into batteries, but it is way too early to bet on a winning horse at this point.
For years I have been interested in batteries big enough to run an entire city ("grid-scale" batteries). I was assuming that something unusual like the liquid metal battery technology or flow batteries would be needed, but Tesla has started selling grid-scale lithium battery packs to Australia. So maybe lithium is even getting inexpensive enough for grid-scale. My understanding is that the Tesla battery in Australia can only supply power for a very short time, so I haven't lost interest in liquid metal or flow batteries.
According to Tesla, the roof is "three times as strong as standard roofing tiles" and one-third the weight of a normal tile. [...] Musk said the strong tempered glass makes it easier to ship than conventional tiles. And because the product is one-third the weight, the cost of shipment is also much lower. "We save on logistics and breakage," he said.
I notice that the Tesla tile is mounted differently than the other two, and I wonder if that's cheating a bit. But it really does shrug off the hail strike.
Any opinions why one should prefer Mint over Ubuntu or Cinnamon over Mate?
Development on both MATE and Cinnamon is mainly done by developers on the Linux Mint project. The basic purpose of Linux Mint is "Ubuntu with a better desktop".
The Mint project was not particularly famous until Ubuntu switched from the GNOME desktop to Unity. At that point, Mint became the top distribution on DistroWatch. (I just checked and it still is.)
The modern GNOME desktop has its fans, but it's completely different than anything else. If you want to use Linux with "classic" desktop, Mint is your best choice.
As to MATE vs. Cinnamon: MATE is based on the original GNOME 2 desktop, and includes a level of UI polish that I personally appreciate. Cinnamon is a set of customizations to the modern GNOME desktop to make it act in a more classic way. Arguably Cinnamon is the future, but every time I try it out, I get annoyed with something or other, so I'm still running Mint with MATE.
As an example of what I mean by a "classic" desktop: Mint provides windows that have minimize, maximize, and close buttons; and a "window list", a panel widget that has one button in it for each window you have open. Modern GNOME, in contrast, provides only a close button, and provides no window list at all; instead it provides a totally unique way to group a few windows together, which is called a "workspace".
When GNOME 3.x first shipped with the GNOME Shell, it offered a new way of working and at the same time it was very difficult to customize it to work more like GNOME 2.x used to work. That's why Mint became such a big deal. I think these days it's easier to make a GNOME 3.x desktop work the way you like, but it's still more convenient go grab Mint Cinnamon if what you want is a "classic" desktop running on GNOME 3.x.
Intel puts some things behind microarchitecture tests because in the past they didn't and people complained. They enabled fast paths after doing feature checks and it turned out that a bunch of x86 chips implemented certain instructions, but in microcoded slow paths
I don't have a link, but I remember years ago someone posted example code generated by the Intel C Compiler for copying bytes. If the CPU ID was Intel, the code compiled the most efficient byte copy possible (IIRC it used SIMD); for non-Intel it was an actual loop that copied one byte per loop iteration, didn't even use REP MOVESB.
I wasn't aware that there was any non-sinister explanation for checking CPU ID; thanks for making me aware. But I continue to think that the Intel C Compiler is actually malicious toward Intel's competition.
What you say could be true, but I think the SJW campaign is probably the biggest reason. It's not just Wolverine.
X-23 is wearing Wolverine's old costume and going by the name "Wolverine" now. Tony Stark is gone, and a teenaged black girl is Iron Man now. (Her name is "IronHeart" but the comic book is still named Iron Man.). Thor is gone and a woman picked up the hammer (she was worthy). Spider-Man isn't gone but there is a second, Hispanic Spider-Man, plus comics where Gen Stacy became Spider-Gwen. They killed Captain America and had Falcon (a black guy) become the new Captain America. There's even a new Hulk, an Asian guy.
In short, SJW Marvel seems to have had a policy of getting rid of the white male versions of their most popular characters, so they could swap in more diverse versions.
There are two huge problems. One is little kids seeing the movies and wanting to buy comics featuring the same characters; none are for sale. They have been walling off their own comics, preventing new customers from becoming fans! The other is that they forgot that their core mission is to tell good stories and entertain their customers... none of this diversity stuff was in service to the story, in fact the stories have been very poor.
There is a guy on YouTube whose channel name is "Diversity and Comics" and he has covered all this. He says that SJW Marvel has been hiring people based on who they are, not their experience making comics. The character of America Chavez is a lesbian female, and Marvel hired a lesbian female to write the comics. But she had no comics experience, and she has done a terrible job of writing comics that fans want to read.
It seems clear that the corporate overlords are out of patience with SJW Marvel. The editor-in-chief was recently replaced, and all signs are that the new guy is going to axe the SJW campaign and try to give the fans what they want. The SJW usual suspects are melting down over this. A half-dozen comics with extremely poor sales were cancelled and the blog coverage was all about the impact this will have on diversity.
If the new editor-in-chief can turn things around, 2018 could be a much better year for Marvel. Most of their problems were self-inflicted.
Thank you for this information. I hadn't paid attention to the microSD slot... that's a plus.
I already have a Bluetooth keyboard, and I'll be using that. It folds in half, so it's conveniently full-sized when you are using it. Important to me: all the keys are where my fingers expect them to be, including things like square braces and the Escape key.
Also important: it has a built-in rechargeable battery instead of using disposable AAA cells.
I specifically recommend this exact keyboard. The same manufacturer also makes some similar keyboards where the keys are subtly in the wrong places, which is maddening. I'm glad they finally got it right and I hope all new keyboards they make will continue to get it right.
With the ConnectBot SSH client, I can do actual work (software development or sysadmin stuff) on my Android tablet.
P.S. There is a seemingly cool new technology called TextBlade. However, it has been vapor for, let's see, about three years now. If it ever does ship and works as advertised I'd spend $100 and get one.
I never bought a Pixel C because I was basically content with my old Nexus 9.
IMHO the Nexus 9 is the perfect size for a tablet. Any bigger and it would be bulkier and heavier; and the screen is just big enough to read technical books (including pages with tables or charts). I used to carry a Nexus 7 and that screen wasn't big enough.
So what I really want is a tablet the same size and weight as my Nexus 9, with USB C and a fingerprint reader. That's it.
The Pixel C tablet is bigger than the Nexus 9 and 81 grams heavier. It does have USB C but does not have a fingerprint reader. So I never spent the money on it.
My Nexus 9 is getting kind of flaky and Google is no longer offering security updates so it's probably time to find something new to replace it. The only thing I have found that looks good is the Samsug Galaxy Tab S3. Similar size (about a half-inch taller and wider, I can deal) and weight (only 2 grams more!) to my Nexus 9, has a slightly bigger screen (9.7 inch diagonal vs. 8.9 inch), has USB C, has a fingerprint reader.
Te summary clearly states that weight is no problem
It does? Here's a quote from the article:
The road will be durable enough to handle vehicles as large as a medium sized truck.
Why does it say that the road would be limited to only having medium-sized vehicles on it, if weight is no problem?
hence you have no repairs bellow the surface
The summary says no such thing. Maybe you think the summary implies it, but I disagree. Roads take a lot of abuse and frequently need repairs. Roads with electronics buried in them can be expected to have all the normal road repairs plus some nonzero number of electronics problems needing repairs.
No idea why you are asking pointless questions for a one mile long research experiment.
There is no point in further discussion. I'm not going to convince you that burying solar panels is a bad idea, and you are not going to convince me that it's a good idea, so let's just walk away from this.
Relevant is: how much energy does an EV comsume while [traveling]
I will now attempt some back-of-the-envelope calculations. Corrections cheerfully accepted if I screw anything up.
Desired: a highway that can use solar power to drive all its traffic. We assume all traffic is electric cars of comparable efficiency to a Tesla Model S. (Note: the article specifically said that the road was to have no heavy trucks on it.)
Rule of thumb: one kilowatt-hour is good for about three miles of driving. (It's actually a touch higher than that but reasonably close to 3, and 3 makes the math easier.) So assume we need something like 330 watt-hours per mile. Converting to metres, we need about 0.205 watt-hours per metre.
But we can't wait an hour to get it... at 60 miles per hour it takes one minute to drive a mile, and one second to drive 1/60 of a mile. Converting to metres we get 26.8 metres per second. Therefore in a second of driving we will need 26.8 * 0.205 == 5.5 watt-hours. There are 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute, so 3600 seconds per hour. To deliver 5.5 watt-hours in one second we need 5.5 * 3600 watts, or 19800 watts.
If Solandri did the math correctly, we get about 0.336 Watts/m^2 from the road. A standard highway lane in America is about 3.5 metres. Therefore for each metre of lane we can hope to gain 0.336 * 3.5 == 1.17 watts.
To get 19800 watts from such a highway we would therefore need 19800 / 1.17 == 16900 metres of lane per car.
Except that we are talking about driving the cars in real-time with an inductive charger. We need to account for the efficiency of the inductive charger. Let's assume an inductive charger can be 75% efficient (which I think is very generous... it's at the high end of numbers from this paper), then we would need about 22500 metres of lane per car. That's one car per 22.5 km (or one car per 14 miles).
Let's work it the other way. I was taught that for safety I should not be closer than 3 seconds of driving time to the car in front of me. If everyone uses that rule, how many metres of road will one car take up at 60 mph/96 kph? 96000 metres / 3600 seconds per hour * 3 seconds == 80 metres
(Note: let's assume that 80 metres is always enough. When cars drive more slowly they pack closer together, with the worst case being bumper-to-bumper traffic where the road is tiled with cars. But electric cars get more efficient when they drive more slowly, so let's just assume it all works out. I feel I've done enough math already.)
So we need 19800 watts from 80 metres of road at 3.5 metres width... we need 19800 / (80 * 3.5) == 70.7 watts/m^2 (about 210 times more efficient than what Solandri calculated).
Or, factoring in a 75% efficient inductive system we would need 94.3 watts/m^2 (about 280 times more efficient than what Solandri calculated).
So we need a solar panel setup that nets 9.4% efficiency in converting solar power: 750 watts/m^2 solar power in, 70.7 watts/m^2 out, 70.5/750 == about 9.4%
Or, factoring in a 75% efficient inductive system we would need a net 12.6% efficient solar panel setup.
Again assuming 0.16 efficient solar cells, we need a capacity factor of about 0.588 to make it work, or 0.786 assuming the inductive system.
If we put solar panels on roofs over highways, it looks to me like we can come surprisingly close to break-even (being able to power the cars on the road purely from the solar panels). If you assume the panels are a bit more than 16% efficient maybe break-even is possible.
But burying the solar panels in the road under translucent concrete means you don't get 100% transmission of light to panels, and you can't angle the panels to improve capacity factor. Also your capacity factor takes a hit as cars put panels into shadow. (If you ever permi
I read the summary and the story link that was in English (and I looked at the one in Chinese). If you believe that the answers to my questions were already provided, please show me what I missed. I didn't see anything about why the panels should be in the road.
I didn't mention the wireless charging part, but you could do that by itself without burying the panels. And I saw nothing about how to repair, or about long-term wiring issues due to weight and/or vibrations.
Also I will be truly impressed if they can manage practical wireless car charging at all. You need kilowatt-hours of electricity to charge a car, and that much power wirelessly... I won't say it's impossible, but I will say "Show me."
The article says the new highway will have transparent concrete over the solar panels. Google didn't find much for me on "transparent concrete", but "translucent concrete" finds stuff.
P.S. I found the above by first searching for "transparent concrete" and Google found a BoingBoing article with only a little info. But after reading the introductory sentence I searched for "translucent concrete Aron Losonczi" and found lots of stuff.
I absolutely do not understand why anyone would consider embedding solar panels underneath clear concrete[1] for a road.
I'm not an engineer but wouldn't the weight and/or vibrations from cars and trucks, over time, possibly mess up the electrical connections or the panels themselves? If so, how do you fix them... dig everything up, throw away everything, install brand-new panels?
If you figure it makes sense to combine solar power with roadways, why not invest in a really tall roof, and let the cars drive under the solar panels? The roof would keep rain and snow off the roads. If there's a wiring problem, workers could get to the wires and just fix them, or swap a faulty panel out. The roof angle could be chosen to help collect sunlight; under-the-road panels you don't have any choice of angle, the panels must be flat. And all the panels would get sunlight all the time, rather than being shaded as vehicles drive over the panel.
In my state there is a section of an Interstate highway that has a tall roof on it; I think it has something to do with winter snow. (The highway department does avalanche control there from time to time in winter.) So I know this sort of roof is at least possible.
Building a roof tall enough for all possible highway traffic sounds annoying and expensive to me, and yet it still sounds like a better idea than burying solar panels and driving on them.
[1] I didn't even know clear concrete is a thing. Google doesn't return much about it but I did find a 2004 BoingBoing article that has two dead links about it.
Luke never claimed he was going to train Rey to be a Jedi.
I never said he did. I was saying that it would have pleased the fans if he had. And, now that I think about it, he did kind of give her one single small lesson: he told her to reach out and breathe. (Then he freaked out at how strong she was, and that was the end of that.)
By the way: the trailer was cut in a way that made me expect to see scenes of Luke training Rey. All the light sabre stuff in the trailer was her training herself without any help from Luke.
Generals and Admirals don't have to tell the people under them a thing. That's part of the chain of command.
This is true, but you cannot seriously tell me that the best leaders leave their people totally in the dark, or that convincing your subordinate that he and everyone else are all about to die is a good teaching technique.
Disclaimer: I've never been in the military so I don't know anything. Total armchair expert. That said, IMHO she should have (a) brought him in on the plan, or else (b) told him "there is a plan, it's need-to-know, and you don't need to know at this time."
There were so few people left, in such obvious imminent peril, that I really doubt there was any reason to be worried about the First Order having spies among them; so there was no reason not to just come right out and tell the plan. When it was time for everyone to get on board the transports everyone was going to know the plan anyway, so I don't see the need to keep anyone in the dark before then. And it's better to give people some hope rather than have them spend hours convinced they are about to die.
When you see it again, you will notice that as Finn and Rose are flying away on their mission, they get a call from Poe
Ah, right. Thank you for this.
Star Wars has always been a soap opera in space, the writing/plot has never been really great
The first two movies had a satisfying plot and good-enough writing. The prequels showed how special effects and imagination aren't enough to salvage a movie with a really terrible script.
Slashdot Mirror
This Nicoll guy is a lively and interesting writer. His writing is opinionated (IMHO that's a plus). But he gets the facts of Starship Troopers unforgivably wrong.
Rico is a very young war criminal in scenes where the "demonstration of firepower and frightfulness" (heh: now, "shock and awe") includes toasting a church congregation of the "Skinnies" with his flamethrower
Nope. Some quotes from the book:
A bit later:
And he didn't use his flamer there; he dropped a bomb that squawked in the Skinny language: "I'm a thirty-second bomb! I'm a thirty-second bomb! Twenty-nine! ... Twenty-eight! ..." So the Skinnies present had a half-minute to flee the bomb.
The Skinnies were allies to the Bugs during the raid you are discussing. Thus, Humanity was in a state of war with both Bugs and Skinnies. Heinlein definitely remembered World War II where frightful amounts of ordnance was dropped on some cities that were important to the war effort, and I'm sure he wouldn't have hesitated to show the humans wiping out a whole city belonging to the Skinnies. But they didn't. Here's a relevant quote from the briefing before the raid:
and looking for the town's water treatment plant with his micro-nuke. (After a 25-year career with the local waterworks, I know that's germ warfare...)
From the first chapter:
Would you and Nicoll have preferred they simply destroyed the whole city, killing everyone in it? I'm really having trouble grasping your objection to their using less-than-immediately-lethal force. Yes, I guess germs are one of the reasons the locals would have to leave their city if the waterworks was destroyed. And...?
The word "liebensraum" does come into the mind.
Nicoll claims this, and you seem to agree. You guys need to wash your minds out with soap. You just Godwined the discussion thread.
Hitler claimed that Germany had a right to expand because the non-Aryan races were weaker and deserved to be conquered. You just basically said Heinlein advocated the same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
In Starship Troopers Heinlein explicitly said that the Bugs attacked human-occupied planets first, starting the war; the attacks included Earth; and that as far as anyone could tell, the issue was that the Bugs "liked the same kind of planets we like" and the Bu
Considered the last of Heinlein's juveniles
Heinlein had a contract to write one juvenile per year. He wrote Starship Troopers and sent it in as his juvenile for that year. The publisher freaked and refused to publish it. He took it to another publisher, who did publish it (and didn't call it a "juvenile") and Heinlein never returned to writing juveniles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinlein_juveniles
P.S. My favorite single novel written by Heinlein was a juvenile: Citizen of the Galaxy A cracking good story.
the entire conflict started with attacks by the bugs. The humans were never interested in occupying the bugs. They were interested in survival.
Absolutely correct.
Heinlein wanted to write a story with no moral ambiguity: the Bugs started the war, and humans had two choices: win, or die.
Ignoring the Bugs was not an option, or else all of humanity would have gone the way of Buenos Aires or any of the other places the Bugs destroyed in the novel.
The only ambiguity I remember in the novel was the scene where the protagonist mulled over the morality of capital punishment. A man had kidnapped and murdered a little girl; once he was found and arrested, he was executed by hanging. Johnny Rico wasn't sure that was morally correct, and spent several pages debating it with himself. In the end he decided that at least the murderer would never murder again, now, and he tabled the discussion so he could sleep. The book never returned to the topic.
Today, Heinlein would probably be considered a Libertarian.
Heinlein has been quoted as saying that he was too libertarian to join anything as organized as the Libertarian Party.
Heinlein played a little bit of a trick with Johnny Rico. He didn't describe his appearance or give you many clues about his background, but then on the last page Johnny mentioned that at home his family speaks Tagalog; therefore he's Filipino. I'm 100% certain that this was a deliberate thing, Heinlein wanting to make sure that people were fans of the hero and then saying "by the way, he was a minority this whole time."
Heinlein depicted a military that was a pure meritocracy, and there was a cadet who was much sharper than Johnny Rico named Hassan; I don't think the novel ever said where he was from but he clearly was from the Middle East somewhere.
When Johnny started training there was a Japanese guy who was also starting training, and the sergeant was glad to have him and put him to work helping train the other recruits in unarmed combat. Keep in mind this book was published about 15 years after the end of World War II. Heinlein wrote a short story called "Water is for Washing" (published only two years after the end of World War II!) where a flood disaster threatened the protagonist; he wound up saving two children, one of whom was Japanese-American. When the protagonist first saw the boy, he said "That's a Jap!" The girl said "No, that's Tommy."
BTW Johnny Rico didn't live in Buenos Aires. When he heard that the Bugs had "smeared" Buenos Aires, he wasn't very upset; "gee, that's too bad" was about his response. Then later he found out his mother was visiting Buenos Aires when it was destroyed, and then he realized that it had touched him personally.
Heinlein was married to a woman who was smart and competent. (Virginia "Ginny" Heinlein) He wrote a number of smart and competent female characters. A lot of people have been hating on Heinlein because his later novels, which actually contained a nonzero amount of sex, had women who approved of sex.
When you look at Heinlein's actual record with his female characters, you can't call him sexist. In his future history, two brilliant scientists invented efficient solar panels; one of them was a woman and she was pulling her weight in the relationship. In "Jerry Was a Man" a main character is a rich woman, who is not super smart, but knows how to manage her businesses and takes no guff from anyone; and she had a trophy husband, and when he stepped out of line, she informed him that he was now exiting her life (it was not a discussion, she just told him how it was going to be). In "If This Goes On--" the male protagonist is not especially smart and has led a sheltered life, and he falls for a woman who is smarter and savvier than he in every way, and who has emotional scars from being sexually used by the dictator of their country. Oh, I could go on and on with examples.
Heinlein once, in an essay, proposed taking the vote away from men, at least for a while. It's hard to tell how serious he was with that suggestion. But to call him sexist against women is just silly.
The service was not necessarily hazardous. Johnny Rico's best friend was brilliant, and requested a job in a research lab, and got it. There was a war on, and the Bugs destroyed the lab (it wasn't on Earth, it was in space somewhere) so it turned out to be hazardous work. But in peacetime it would have been a non-hazardous posting.
There was a question in the book: What if a blind and deaf person wanted to serve? The answer: some kind of service would be found, even if it was makework like "counting the fuzz on a caterpillar by touch" (quote from memory). Nothing hazardous about that proposed makework.
Johnny Rico only applied for military jobs; in his opinion, if he couldn't get a military job, he didn't care where they sent him. Perhaps not everyone agreed with him.
The kicker, though: if you applied for service, they had to take you, but they didn't have to give you the posting you requested. Even if you applied to be a typist, they might put you in the army instead. So applying for service was effectively putting your life at risk. I'm only arguing that the fictional government didn't go out of its way to make every job hazardous; where they had non-hazardous jobs, people got posted to non-hazardous jobs.
P.S. In the canon of the book, women have superior math intuition compared to men, and thus women make the best starship pilots and all the pilots were women. Johnny Rico's female acquaintance applied as a pilot, and got it. Again, not much hazardous about such a job in peacetime.
Once honorably discharged from service a person now has the right to vote. They are free to vote in any manner they chose. The government will follow the majority of the voters. There is no fascist dictate from government. The enfranchised elite have "earned" the right to believe whatever they chose to in a political power sense, their majority has "earned" the right to direct the government. The voters are in control.
This. One thousand times this. Absolutely correct.
And, during the service, they didn't have the vote. This was to avoid moral hazard, such as government servants voting for more pay for government servants.
I got "1981" from Wikipedia. Re-reading, it doesn't specifically say that the actual Windows 1.0 codebase started in 1981, just that Microsoft "began developing a graphical user interface (GUI) in 1981."
I'll agree that what Microsoft was working on in 1981 probably got thrown away and didn't become part of Windows 1.0. However, I think my larger point stands, that Microsoft was working on a GUI long before the Mac came out, and didn't need to steal the Mac OS source code for their own project.
it wasn't fear, but greed that motivated Bill Gates in 1982
"Greed" is an emotionally-charged word but I basically agree. Gates wanted Microsoft to make a GUI, and he did want to make money by doing it.
without Microsoft working on software development for the new MacOS, they might not have developed Windows, in the above article Jeff Raikes attributes Bill Gates' conversion to believing in GUIs specifically to exposure to the MacOS.
Here's the relevant quote: "...I think at that point in time, you know, it really clicked with Bill that, you know, graphic user interface was going to be the way, the way of the future." I'm not sure what you think this proves. One guy says that in his opinion, "it really clicked" for Bill Gates that GUIs would be important. But at least if we believe Wikipedia, Microsoft was already working on a GUI. And according to Bill Gates he was a believer in GUI ever since he saw the computers at Xerox PARC.
What if Apple had done what Bill Gates asked and built and released a MacOS for PCs in 1985? Would there be no Windows?
In 1985, Windows was still a joke. If MacOS had been widely released, Microsoft would have given up on Windows and just accepted MacOS as the new standard. Microsoft made a lot of money selling Mac applications.
When the customers voted against OS/2 and for Windows, Microsoft accepted this reality; they walked away from OS/2 and started pushing Windows. If mass release of MacOS had happened, Microsoft would have accepted this reality, and focused on selling apps and making money that way.
Here's a Quora answer I wrote that includes my thoughts on a mass release of MacOS. My opinion hasn't changed since I wrote that.
Now that Windows is huge and important, Microsoft won't walk away from it. But back in the day when Windows was a joke, if MacOS had seen a mass release as a new standard, Microsoft would not have had any reason to keep trying to turn Windows into something good.
the point wasn't that they stole the entire code base and ran it as is.
Please provide some kind of evidence to support your theory that Microsoft stole and used actual code from Apple. Frankly when Apple was suing Microsoft, if Microsoft had actually stolen code, Apple would have added that to the lawsuit. But the Apple suit was over this nebulous concept of "look and feel", not over code theft.
Microsoft pre-empted the lawsuit, they told then CEO John Scully if he tried to sue they would stop development of Word and Excel for the Mac. Apple needed both of those applications because they were losing market share already. Then, to permanently stop any lawsuits over it, Microsoft offered to licence some of the Mac technologies.
And, after agreeing not to sue, Apple sued. And in that lawsuit they didn't say anything about code theft. Evidence or it didn't happen.
About "sabotaging OS/2"... I assumed that what you meant by "sabotage" was deliberately inserting malicious code while Microsoft was working on OS/2. Your link is an example of Microsoft people trash-talking OS/2, including a demo that a user-mode application could take
without Jobs working on MacOS, Gates and Microsoft wouldn't have been scared enough (or able to) steal the MacOS code to create Windows 1.0.
You're crazy and this is crazy talk. Microsoft started working on Windows 1.0 in 1981, before the Mac ever shipped. Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had seen demos of GUI computers at Xerox PARC and both determined that their respective companies should make GUI computing products. Microsoft fearing Apple was not in any way a factor. In 1981 the standard Apple computer was an Apple II with Microsoft BASIC and there was no adversarial relationship between the two companies, let alone fear.
The MacOS code wouldn't run on standard x86 hardware, and was a mix of Pascal and 68000 assembler. The MacOS code didn't have support for the crazy graphics cards people were running on x86 hardware in the late 80's. Windows 1.x was able to run on an 8088 chip, on top of DOS, so it was full of hacks to deal with the insane memory architecture needed for that. In short, even if Microsoft had stolen the code somehow, it wouldn't have done them any good; and I flatly don't believe that Microsoft stole any code. Apple never accused them of stealing code, and Apple was never shy.
It also means that OS/2 might actually have been finished earlier instead of being sabotaged by Microsoft.
I worked at Microsoft in the early 1990s and when I was hired, everyone expected OS/2 to be the future. I personally ported a bunch of utility programs so that they could run under OS/2 because we all were running OS/2 on our dev machines. (The utility programs were written in a DOS version of SNOBOL; I rewrote in Thompson AWK, which had a native OS/2 version.)
What happened to OS/2: customers voted with their dollars, and they voted for Windows. It didn't happen overnight... it took over 8 years for Microsoft to develop a Windows customers wanted. Windows 1.0 was a joke. Windows 2.0 became less of a joke (Jerry Pournelle at the time said something about Apple never needed to worry about Windows 1.x but ought to start worrying) but was still ugly and limited compared to a Mac. Windows 3.0 was a home run and flew off the shelves.
Windows 3.0 running on a 386 or higher could virtualize DOS apps, thus letting companies standardized on DOS apps run them side by side with each other and with native Windows apps; OS/2 at the time still had a single "compatibility box" for running one DOS app at a time. If you had a computer with a luxurious 4 MB of RAM, you could use all of that memory... Windows 3.0 was even better than DESQview.
Microsoft management decided to run with the product that the customers liked. They negotiated a "divorce" with IBM where IBM kept OS/2. The only "sabotage" Microsoft committed was to stop working on OS/2. If you want to claim otherwise, please provide some proof.
Now, Microsoft might have just stolen the OS/2 code, but that might have more difficult to do.
Microsoft helped write the OS/2 code. I'm sure they had plenty of copies of it. IBM never accused them of doing anything improper with their access to the code. And we have the same problem as with your idea that Microsoft stole Mac OS code: the OS/2 code is nothing like the Windows code. As an example, IBM insisted that the graphics coordinate system for OS/2 be different from Windows... IIRC the 0,0 pixel was in the upper-left of the window instead of lower-left, something like that. Microsoft tried to get IBM to agree to let OS/2 be more compatible with Windows so that it would be easier for companies to port apps to both. (Most companies at the time targeted OS/2 for app porting, since everyone expected that the IBM OS would ultimately win. Microsoft covered all the bets, porting their apps to both Windows and OS/2, so when Windows took off Microsoft had their apps ready to sell.) As another example, Windows used cooperative multitasking, except on a 386 or above where it used 386 features; OS/2 at the time used 286 Protect Mo
investors are confident their investment will yield exponential returns from some new tech we havent seen or current/old tech we haven't seen utilized in a new way
It could also be that investors are betting that Tesla is going to make it big on first-mover advantage and network effect.
Right now, all the electric cars are great second cars. For short trips around town, commuting to work, etc. a Nissan Leaf is great. But if you want to take a long road trip for any reason, you aren't taking that Nissan Leaf. You use your gasoline car.
All the electric cars, except Tesla. Tesla's Supercharger network is something that they have paid huge money to put together, and it means that you really can have just a Tesla as your only car. Long road trips? Just stop at a Supercharger and eat a snack or something while your car charges.
Only Tesla has the Supercharger network and cars that can use it. With any other brand of car, charging will take at least twice as long.
Assuming that Tesla can get their production line running smoothly for the Model 3, they can sell a lot of cars each year. And they are going to make money on each of those cars.
Right now, Tesla is losing lots of money, but it's not being wasted. They invested in R&D to develop the new Model 3, the new Semi, and the new sports car. They invested in equipment to make the Model 3. They invested in their own battery factory so they can get the lowest cost on batteries.
So the best possible scenario for Tesla: they get the Model 3 production line flowing and sell nearly half a million cars in 2018, and by 2019 or 2020 they are all caught up on back orders and selling over half a million Model 3s each year. They make a lot of money per car due to low cost on the batteries. All those cars use the Tesla Supercharger network, and lots of friends and family of Tesla owners get rides in the new cars and decide they want Teslas also, leading to more orders for Model 3s. Then they start selling lots of Semis, they finish the Model Y and sell lots of those, and they wind up owning a large chunk of the battery electric vehicle market. People start buying Teslas because they are confident in the charging network, and Tesla can afford to build out the charging network even more because they are now finally making money, and it snowballs. Then one or more factories in Europe come on line, making batteries and cars, and Tesla starts selling over a million cars per year. And the factory in Shanghai comes on line and they sell even more. Where does it end? Could Tesla grow to be the size of Honda?
Note that nothing in that scenario assumes new tech we haven't seen, or really even old tech we haven't seen utilized in a new way. It just assumes that Tesla wins big by being the first company to get volumes up and costs down enough to really sell a battery electric vehicle at a price people can afford. Plus Tesla wins in the Semi space by being the first company with a viable product.
Tesla also has a fairly wild plan, where they finish the full (level 5) self-driving features; they get legal approval for the cars to drive around on their own; and Tesla owners can opt-in to have their cars driving in an Uber-like carsharing service called Tesla Network. Imagine people have their cars drive them to work. Then, while they are at work, their cars join themselves to the service, and drive around picking people up and dropping them off; the people get paid for the trips their cars make, and then when it's time for them to go home for the day their cars automatically release themselves from the service and go to pick them up and drive them home. Thus a l
I live in Washington state, and when I pay my annual registration fee I also have to pay an "Electric Vehicle Tax" of $200. I estimate that this is equal to about 10 months of the gasoline tax on my previous car (with the amount of driving I do). People who drive more than I do would have a bigger difference.
I predict that any state that is worried about the loss of gasoline tax will simply enact new taxes, as Washington state did.
the cost for an EV will probably never come down to a parity with ICE cars
Most experts think that once the cost of a battery comes down, battery electric vehicles will cost less than ICE vehicles. Some people are claiming that BEVs are already cheaper than ICEVs if you take total cost of ownership into account.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/01/electric-cars-already-cheaper-to-own-and-run-than-petrol-or-diesel-study
I have seen several people repeating the claim that when lithium batteries for cars drop below $100 per kilowatt-hour, BEVs will cost less than ICEVs and consumers will start switching to them to save money. Elon Musk has in the past said that 2020 could be the year this happens. (For Tesla, anyway, since Tesla built its own battery factory just to get the lowest cost on batteries.)
https://electrek.co/2017/01/30/electric-vehicle-battery-cost-dropped-80-6-years-227kwh-tesla-190kwh/
the only hope is for some type of battery that does not involve lithium
I'll bet you that BEVs will boom in the next few years, still using lithium batteries. The high price of lithium is sending a signal to the free market, and as a result more development of lithium resources is happening. If prices are high enough, lithium and other metals can be recovered from sea water, and we aren't running out of sea water anytime soon. Also, we haven't really started recycling lithium car batteries yet, but that's coming too.
According to this article a Tesla Model S only needs 15 pounds / 7 kg of lithium, about as much as a bowling ball; and experts think that just the lithium available from mining would be enough for 185 years.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-lithium-battery-future/
Tons of research is going into batteries, but it is way too early to bet on a winning horse at this point.
For years I have been interested in batteries big enough to run an entire city ("grid-scale" batteries). I was assuming that something unusual like the liquid metal battery technology or flow batteries would be needed, but Tesla has started selling grid-scale lithium battery packs to Australia. So maybe lithium is even getting inexpensive enough for grid-scale. My understanding is that the Tesla battery in Australia can only supply power for a very short time, so I haven't lost interest in liquid metal or flow batteries.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/26/teslas-enormous-battery-in-australia-just-weeks-old-is-already-responding-to-outages-in-record-time/
http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/liquid-metal-battery-inventor-questions-lithium-ion-as-grid-scale-storage-solution-2017-03-29
twice as heavy as a regular roof
This article claims that the Tesla tiles are one-third the weight of typical roofing tiles.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/heres-how-much-a-tesla-solar-roof-will-cost-you
Tesla claims it will do better than a less-expensive conventional non-solar roof.
This page has video showing tests where they hit a tile with a 2 inch hail pellet traveling 100 MPH. (That's 50 mm and traveling 160 kph.)
https://www.tesla.com/solarroof
I notice that the Tesla tile is mounted differently than the other two, and I wonder if that's cheating a bit. But it really does shrug off the hail strike.
Any opinions why one should prefer Mint over Ubuntu or Cinnamon over Mate?
Development on both MATE and Cinnamon is mainly done by developers on the Linux Mint project. The basic purpose of Linux Mint is "Ubuntu with a better desktop".
The Mint project was not particularly famous until Ubuntu switched from the GNOME desktop to Unity. At that point, Mint became the top distribution on DistroWatch. (I just checked and it still is.)
The modern GNOME desktop has its fans, but it's completely different than anything else. If you want to use Linux with "classic" desktop, Mint is your best choice.
As to MATE vs. Cinnamon: MATE is based on the original GNOME 2 desktop, and includes a level of UI polish that I personally appreciate. Cinnamon is a set of customizations to the modern GNOME desktop to make it act in a more classic way. Arguably Cinnamon is the future, but every time I try it out, I get annoyed with something or other, so I'm still running Mint with MATE.
As an example of what I mean by a "classic" desktop: Mint provides windows that have minimize, maximize, and close buttons; and a "window list", a panel widget that has one button in it for each window you have open. Modern GNOME, in contrast, provides only a close button, and provides no window list at all; instead it provides a totally unique way to group a few windows together, which is called a "workspace".
When GNOME 3.x first shipped with the GNOME Shell, it offered a new way of working and at the same time it was very difficult to customize it to work more like GNOME 2.x used to work. That's why Mint became such a big deal. I think these days it's easier to make a GNOME 3.x desktop work the way you like, but it's still more convenient go grab Mint Cinnamon if what you want is a "classic" desktop running on GNOME 3.x.
Intel puts some things behind microarchitecture tests because in the past they didn't and people complained. They enabled fast paths after doing feature checks and it turned out that a bunch of x86 chips implemented certain instructions, but in microcoded slow paths
I don't have a link, but I remember years ago someone posted example code generated by the Intel C Compiler for copying bytes. If the CPU ID was Intel, the code compiled the most efficient byte copy possible (IIRC it used SIMD); for non-Intel it was an actual loop that copied one byte per loop iteration, didn't even use REP MOVESB.
I wasn't aware that there was any non-sinister explanation for checking CPU ID; thanks for making me aware. But I continue to think that the Intel C Compiler is actually malicious toward Intel's competition.
What you say could be true, but I think the SJW campaign is probably the biggest reason. It's not just Wolverine.
X-23 is wearing Wolverine's old costume and going by the name "Wolverine" now. Tony Stark is gone, and a teenaged black girl is Iron Man now. (Her name is "IronHeart" but the comic book is still named Iron Man.). Thor is gone and a woman picked up the hammer (she was worthy). Spider-Man isn't gone but there is a second, Hispanic Spider-Man, plus comics where Gen Stacy became Spider-Gwen. They killed Captain America and had Falcon (a black guy) become the new Captain America. There's even a new Hulk, an Asian guy.
In short, SJW Marvel seems to have had a policy of getting rid of the white male versions of their most popular characters, so they could swap in more diverse versions.
There are two huge problems. One is little kids seeing the movies and wanting to buy comics featuring the same characters; none are for sale. They have been walling off their own comics, preventing new customers from becoming fans! The other is that they forgot that their core mission is to tell good stories and entertain their customers... none of this diversity stuff was in service to the story, in fact the stories have been very poor.
There is a guy on YouTube whose channel name is "Diversity and Comics" and he has covered all this. He says that SJW Marvel has been hiring people based on who they are, not their experience making comics. The character of America Chavez is a lesbian female, and Marvel hired a lesbian female to write the comics. But she had no comics experience, and she has done a terrible job of writing comics that fans want to read.
It seems clear that the corporate overlords are out of patience with SJW Marvel. The editor-in-chief was recently replaced, and all signs are that the new guy is going to axe the SJW campaign and try to give the fans what they want. The SJW usual suspects are melting down over this. A half-dozen comics with extremely poor sales were cancelled and the blog coverage was all about the impact this will have on diversity.
If the new editor-in-chief can turn things around, 2018 could be a much better year for Marvel. Most of their problems were self-inflicted.
Thank you for this information. I hadn't paid attention to the microSD slot... that's a plus.
I already have a Bluetooth keyboard, and I'll be using that. It folds in half, so it's conveniently full-sized when you are using it. Important to me: all the keys are where my fingers expect them to be, including things like square braces and the Escape key.
Also important: it has a built-in rechargeable battery instead of using disposable AAA cells.
https://www.amazon.com/Perixx-PERIBOARD-805L-Bluetooth-Folding-Keyboard/dp/B00JXI94IE
I specifically recommend this exact keyboard. The same manufacturer also makes some similar keyboards where the keys are subtly in the wrong places, which is maddening. I'm glad they finally got it right and I hope all new keyboards they make will continue to get it right.
With the ConnectBot SSH client, I can do actual work (software development or sysadmin stuff) on my Android tablet.
P.S. There is a seemingly cool new technology called TextBlade. However, it has been vapor for, let's see, about three years now. If it ever does ship and works as advertised I'd spend $100 and get one.
https://waytools.com/
I never bought a Pixel C because I was basically content with my old Nexus 9.
IMHO the Nexus 9 is the perfect size for a tablet. Any bigger and it would be bulkier and heavier; and the screen is just big enough to read technical books (including pages with tables or charts). I used to carry a Nexus 7 and that screen wasn't big enough.
So what I really want is a tablet the same size and weight as my Nexus 9, with USB C and a fingerprint reader. That's it.
The Pixel C tablet is bigger than the Nexus 9 and 81 grams heavier. It does have USB C but does not have a fingerprint reader. So I never spent the money on it.
My Nexus 9 is getting kind of flaky and Google is no longer offering security updates so it's probably time to find something new to replace it. The only thing I have found that looks good is the Samsug Galaxy Tab S3. Similar size (about a half-inch taller and wider, I can deal) and weight (only 2 grams more!) to my Nexus 9, has a slightly bigger screen (9.7 inch diagonal vs. 8.9 inch), has USB C, has a fingerprint reader.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/03/galaxy-tab-s3-review-the-high-price-of-a-well-rounded-android-tablet/
Te summary clearly states that weight is no problem
It does? Here's a quote from the article:
Why does it say that the road would be limited to only having medium-sized vehicles on it, if weight is no problem?
hence you have no repairs bellow the surface
The summary says no such thing. Maybe you think the summary implies it, but I disagree. Roads take a lot of abuse and frequently need repairs. Roads with electronics buried in them can be expected to have all the normal road repairs plus some nonzero number of electronics problems needing repairs.
No idea why you are asking pointless questions for a one mile long research experiment.
There is no point in further discussion. I'm not going to convince you that burying solar panels is a bad idea, and you are not going to convince me that it's a good idea, so let's just walk away from this.
Happy holidays and happy new year to you.
Relevant is: how much energy does an EV comsume while [traveling]
I will now attempt some back-of-the-envelope calculations. Corrections cheerfully accepted if I screw anything up.
Desired: a highway that can use solar power to drive all its traffic. We assume all traffic is electric cars of comparable efficiency to a Tesla Model S. (Note: the article specifically said that the road was to have no heavy trucks on it.)
Rule of thumb: one kilowatt-hour is good for about three miles of driving. (It's actually a touch higher than that but reasonably close to 3, and 3 makes the math easier.) So assume we need something like 330 watt-hours per mile. Converting to metres, we need about 0.205 watt-hours per metre.
But we can't wait an hour to get it... at 60 miles per hour it takes one minute to drive a mile, and one second to drive 1/60 of a mile. Converting to metres we get 26.8 metres per second. Therefore in a second of driving we will need 26.8 * 0.205 == 5.5 watt-hours. There are 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute, so 3600 seconds per hour. To deliver 5.5 watt-hours in one second we need 5.5 * 3600 watts, or 19800 watts.
If Solandri did the math correctly, we get about 0.336 Watts/m^2 from the road. A standard highway lane in America is about 3.5 metres. Therefore for each metre of lane we can hope to gain 0.336 * 3.5 == 1.17 watts.
To get 19800 watts from such a highway we would therefore need 19800 / 1.17 == 16900 metres of lane per car.
Except that we are talking about driving the cars in real-time with an inductive charger. We need to account for the efficiency of the inductive charger. Let's assume an inductive charger can be 75% efficient (which I think is very generous... it's at the high end of numbers from this paper), then we would need about 22500 metres of lane per car. That's one car per 22.5 km (or one car per 14 miles).
Let's work it the other way. I was taught that for safety I should not be closer than 3 seconds of driving time to the car in front of me. If everyone uses that rule, how many metres of road will one car take up at 60 mph/96 kph? 96000 metres / 3600 seconds per hour * 3 seconds == 80 metres
(Note: let's assume that 80 metres is always enough. When cars drive more slowly they pack closer together, with the worst case being bumper-to-bumper traffic where the road is tiled with cars. But electric cars get more efficient when they drive more slowly, so let's just assume it all works out. I feel I've done enough math already.)
So we need 19800 watts from 80 metres of road at 3.5 metres width... we need 19800 / (80 * 3.5) == 70.7 watts/m^2 (about 210 times more efficient than what Solandri calculated).
Or, factoring in a 75% efficient inductive system we would need 94.3 watts/m^2 (about 280 times more efficient than what Solandri calculated).
So we need a solar panel setup that nets 9.4% efficiency in converting solar power: 750 watts/m^2 solar power in, 70.7 watts/m^2 out, 70.5/750 == about 9.4%
Or, factoring in a 75% efficient inductive system we would need a net 12.6% efficient solar panel setup.
Again assuming 0.16 efficient solar cells, we need a capacity factor of about 0.588 to make it work, or 0.786 assuming the inductive system.
If we put solar panels on roofs over highways, it looks to me like we can come surprisingly close to break-even (being able to power the cars on the road purely from the solar panels). If you assume the panels are a bit more than 16% efficient maybe break-even is possible.
But burying the solar panels in the road under translucent concrete means you don't get 100% transmission of light to panels, and you can't angle the panels to improve capacity factor. Also your capacity factor takes a hit as cars put panels into shadow. (If you ever permi
I read the summary and the story link that was in English (and I looked at the one in Chinese). If you believe that the answers to my questions were already provided, please show me what I missed. I didn't see anything about why the panels should be in the road.
I didn't mention the wireless charging part, but you could do that by itself without burying the panels. And I saw nothing about how to repair, or about long-term wiring issues due to weight and/or vibrations.
Also I will be truly impressed if they can manage practical wireless car charging at all. You need kilowatt-hours of electricity to charge a car, and that much power wirelessly... I won't say it's impossible, but I will say "Show me."
The article says the new highway will have transparent concrete over the solar panels. Google didn't find much for me on "transparent concrete", but "translucent concrete" finds stuff.
http://illumin.usc.edu/245/translucent-concrete-an-emerging-material/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Translucent_concrete
P.S. I found the above by first searching for "transparent concrete" and Google found a BoingBoing article with only a little info. But after reading the introductory sentence I searched for "translucent concrete Aron Losonczi" and found lots of stuff.
I absolutely do not understand why anyone would consider embedding solar panels underneath clear concrete[1] for a road.
I'm not an engineer but wouldn't the weight and/or vibrations from cars and trucks, over time, possibly mess up the electrical connections or the panels themselves? If so, how do you fix them... dig everything up, throw away everything, install brand-new panels?
If you figure it makes sense to combine solar power with roadways, why not invest in a really tall roof, and let the cars drive under the solar panels? The roof would keep rain and snow off the roads. If there's a wiring problem, workers could get to the wires and just fix them, or swap a faulty panel out. The roof angle could be chosen to help collect sunlight; under-the-road panels you don't have any choice of angle, the panels must be flat. And all the panels would get sunlight all the time, rather than being shaded as vehicles drive over the panel.
In my state there is a section of an Interstate highway that has a tall roof on it; I think it has something to do with winter snow. (The highway department does avalanche control there from time to time in winter.) So I know this sort of roof is at least possible.
Building a roof tall enough for all possible highway traffic sounds annoying and expensive to me, and yet it still sounds like a better idea than burying solar panels and driving on them.
[1] I didn't even know clear concrete is a thing. Google doesn't return much about it but I did find a 2004 BoingBoing article that has two dead links about it.
Luke never claimed he was going to train Rey to be a Jedi.
I never said he did. I was saying that it would have pleased the fans if he had. And, now that I think about it, he did kind of give her one single small lesson: he told her to reach out and breathe. (Then he freaked out at how strong she was, and that was the end of that.)
By the way: the trailer was cut in a way that made me expect to see scenes of Luke training Rey. All the light sabre stuff in the trailer was her training herself without any help from Luke.
Generals and Admirals don't have to tell the people under them a thing. That's part of the chain of command.
This is true, but you cannot seriously tell me that the best leaders leave their people totally in the dark, or that convincing your subordinate that he and everyone else are all about to die is a good teaching technique.
Disclaimer: I've never been in the military so I don't know anything. Total armchair expert. That said, IMHO she should have (a) brought him in on the plan, or else (b) told him "there is a plan, it's need-to-know, and you don't need to know at this time."
There were so few people left, in such obvious imminent peril, that I really doubt there was any reason to be worried about the First Order having spies among them; so there was no reason not to just come right out and tell the plan. When it was time for everyone to get on board the transports everyone was going to know the plan anyway, so I don't see the need to keep anyone in the dark before then. And it's better to give people some hope rather than have them spend hours convinced they are about to die.
When you see it again, you will notice that as Finn and Rose are flying away on their mission, they get a call from Poe
Ah, right. Thank you for this.
Star Wars has always been a soap opera in space, the writing/plot has never been really great
The first two movies had a satisfying plot and good-enough writing. The prequels showed how special effects and imagination aren't enough to salvage a movie with a really terrible script.