They say they have a much larger potential for storage than they are now using... that implies tanks most tanks are empty. I suggest fitting those empty tanks with multiple flexible bladders... say, 8 or ten bladders per tank... the outside walls should be lined with steel fabric such as conventional chain link fencing, so that if the rigid, outer walls are compromised, the steel fencing fabric will hopefully still be able to contain the bladders with their content. Fill that tank with its bladders with oil from one of the other tanks, and retrofit each other tank one at a time until all are upgraded. It would be expensive, but would be about the same thing as spending the money New Orleans really needed to prevent the worst of the Katrina disaster that we still have not recovered from. An ounce of prevention... blah, blah, blah. We need to stop spending so much money recovering from disasters, and use forethought.
You are exceedingly delusional. If solar were not competitive, there would not be thousands of people every day installing panels on the roofs of their houses in, So Cal, and with something just starting to come online called "quantum dots", solar power can soon become economically feasible even in the cloudier states in the northwest... in fact, solar power is already becoming a major player in places such as England and, Wales, which are cloudy much of the day. Stuff your cynicism... figure out what it is you are so damned afraid of seeing the world become more efficient and viable, because you are seeing a skewed picture that does not agree with reality. Wake up and stop trying so desperately to scare people into thinking there are no answers for a better and saner future.
If what you think is true, the popularity of EVs would not be surging. Driving EVs in So Cal for years, "range aanxiety " is of little consequence... there are "fast chargers" that can give many of today's EVs 80% of their capacity in 15 or 30 minutes; tweaking of battery chemistries (of which there are different chemistries among the dozens of various car makers) has meant a steady upward creep in range, and entities like MIT, IBM, Stanford, and dozens of other major players are jockeying to come up with the next major breakthrough battery. Some of them are tantalizing close to chemistries that would allow a car to trip from L.A. to Atlanta on a single charge. Other approaches may make it possible to recharge in no more time than it takes to refuel a car today. And when it comes to a buck or two (or even free electricity in some cases), a lot of people are wuite willing to spend a few minutes to charge rather than spend forty or fifty bucks (or even more for an SUV) on gasoline. No matter how you try to imagine EVs as not being ready to bl9ssom in popularity, all you have to do is see just how satisfied EV owners are today, and how much more satisfied they will be as tech improves, which it will.
I've been driving EVs for a few years now, and it is quite different than most people assume that do not own or drive EVs. As, for "free" and "charge-to-charge", anyone that drives EVs eventually realizes that "free" won't last forever, and the "free" is in large part to encourage and reward drivers for making the big step to change from ICE to EV. One of the curious aspects of this evolution is that the roads and bridges and related infrastructure is, paid, for by gas taxes; that means we EV drivers are paying nothing to drive on public roads since we buy no gssoline. But as the numbers of EV drivers swell, that has to change at, some point-- the cost of a new EV from the showroom will continue to drop due to the continuous drop in the cost of the batteries that power them, since billions are being spent yearly to tweak and, refine and research battery tech. In a few months, Tesla's 5 billion - dollar battery factory ("Gigafactory") will be online, and so batteries-- and, EVs-- will suddenly start to drop in price even more. It is expected that EVs-- which are more powerful, far simpler, less expensive to maintain and more convenient in many ways-- will creep lower and lower in price until they may eventually be even less expensive than ICE cars. Long before they hit that point, though, there will be a huge shift to abandon gasoline in favor of electrons. There will be a certain degree of growing pains, but as EVs become more commonplace, many things will change for the better, including the collapse of the Oil Gluttons... many people will be driving EVs with power they generate on their own roofs, and living expenses will dramatically decrease. One likely problem will be an increase in road traffic, due to lower costs of driving, but traffic accidents will drop significantly because of computerized collision avoidance and other similar tech... self-driving cars.
Sorry, but you obviously do not have an EV, and do not have any first - hand knowledge of EV charging infrastructure, or how the electricity is paid for. I have two EVs; the electricity I get at home I pay less for than if I was driving with gasoline, and I never will again have to spend days and a thousand dollars or more trying to get it to pass smog as i have done too many times in the past; no more oil changes, spark plugs, replacement mufflers, oil changes, air filters, oil filters, and, wasted time in repair shops, etc: nearly zero maintenance. The electricity I get when out during the day varies-- there are Costco stores, Starbucks, Nordstroms, city halls and other places that provide free charging while shopping, eating or doing business. Pollution is a REAL thing with REAL consequences; when I came to L.A. In 1970 the pollution was so bad I did not know there were mountains in the area for months, until there was a rain hard enough to clear the air so I could see them. Today, the mountains are always visible. Responsible city leaders know that when the air is clean we have fewer people in the emergency rooms for asthma and emphysema and heart attacks; good air means less money spent on health care, and people are healthier. So many cities provide some free public charging stations to encourage EV use. There are also thousands of pay charging stations as well, but they do not work as you incorrectly guessed. They are part of a seamless system where I simply pull up, plug in my car, and wave a little plastic key chain card over the charging station, which immediately allows the car to begin charging. Unlike your supposition, if someone disconnects my cable, my car stops charging, but the charging network knows it, and will not allow that other person to charge up on my credit. I have an account with "ChargePoint" which makes everything super easy and seamless, such as notifying me by text message when my car is finished charging, and, how, much credit I, have left on the sydtem. I can also instantaneously add more credit to my account to pay for my electricity from a credit card or bank account. It is far more convenient than putting up with noxious fumes at gas stations, and the hundreds of dollars a month I'd have to be paying for gasoline. I will never go back to ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles.
Idiot cynics such as yourself are disgusting. I converted a BMW to a powerful, fully electric vehicle back before there were Teslas or other EVs to buy on the market. I did NOT do it to make myself look superior to you of, anyone else. I have two EVs now, and take satisfaction in knowing I am contributing to the hundreds of billions of dollars yearly we spend on foreign oil; it is unavoidable that a certain percentage of that money goes to terrible people, just as terrible as Osama bin Laden, who use that money to do terrible things like funding terrorism and shoe bombers and underwear bombers and suicide bombers in countries all over the world. When we drive EVs, we are getting the power we use to drive from LOCAL sources-- generating plants, or hydroelectric plants, or maybe solar panels on the roof of my home. In any case, there is no money going overseas to fund terrible things... if we all decided to stop driving with gasoline, we would suddenly have hundreds of billions of dollars available to spend on our bospitals, schools, roads and bridges and balancing our national debt. Get your head out of your butt and stop thinking that every time someone does something positive in the world, it is just to help give you reasons to be even more cynical, asinine and antisocial.
UGGGH!!! "some drag", yes! In fact, the drag you create would be GREATER than the current you would reap from such a system... guaranteed. Find any small hand-crank generator designed to charge a battery or give you some light. Connect it to any load, such as an old-style tungsten 60-watt bulb... crank it under load... have someone disconnect the load as you crank... you will note it will be immediately easier to crank... the more electric load you put on the generator, the harder it will be to crank. If you put any kind of turbine blade on the car to generate electricity, it will create significant drag while driving... in other words, there is no free lunch. Unless, of course, you have it generating while the car is sitting still, or if you have solar panels on your roof-- but they won't give you significant amounts of electricity. If you put solar cells all over the roof, for instance, it would only be useful for keeping your car ventilated a bit while you were at work or at the market, which is what some EV makers are already doing.
MOOT!!! No basis for your nattering in the least! This Nissan thingie is being developed only years after Tesla, Google, MB and others have been developing self-driving cars, meaning that by the time it is ready to put in real cars, those cars are likely to be self-driving, anyway, making all this bling of no importance re: road safety. The various teams developing this self-driving tech are in agreement on one thing: it will not be used by the general public until it can be shown to be ten times better than human drivers under identical conditions; Musk says their self-driving cars are already in the ball park, but that they have much more to do-- they want to harden it against hackers, to make the systems massively redundant (currently the systems have about 10 computers linked in serial to make it work, and if any one computer fails it is out of action. Therefore, multiples of multiples will be necessary to satisfy their concerns.)
You really question Americans' support for NASA?!? DUHHH.. the box office receipts for the film under discussion will tell you that. You sound like a total Luddite.
You are hopelessly inept. The only reason there is, any "debate" on the subject of Global Warming and similar eco issues is because oligarch mega - control freaks like the Koch brothers don't respect anything but money and are maniacally obsessed with tacking on more zeroes at the end oof their net worth. Anything such as reducing pollution or crime, or making it easier for a kindergartner to get food in his belly every morning before school... anything at all that might get in the way of another dime in their coffers... is to be thrashed out of existence, even if it means spending even more money to defeat commonsense, compassionate efforts. So when the cast majority of scientists say there is global wsrming, they will, spend billions if they have to, to spread the disinformstion, confusion and outright lies to warp the entire landscape, drowning out any common sense, shouting so loudly and profanely and persistently that their own decrepit message is the only one, anyone hears. Thank Fox News, Drudge report et. al for that. So... even though hard science from every direction says one thing, jackass clowns such as Jeb! Bush can be so blatantly idiotic as to tell the Pope (who has a degree in, chemistry, which Jeb! does not-- that the Pope needs to stick to relidgin, and keep his nose out of science. And why?! Because Jeb! and his ilk decide what is most in the interest of the 1%, and anything such as the vast majority of scientists must be wrong if they disagree with those swine that want to swallow the entire planet. Tea Partiers and the most radical elements of the GOP become more rabid with every passing day, tearing thecflesh, from their own kind, such as Boehner, who they vilify just because he couldn't find a, way to trash the entire political process, and force the majority of, America to accept the warped, insane, demands of these cretins. I fully expect them to try to steal the election again as they did with their hanging chads, voter role manipulations and other perversions of the Democratic process, and whoever is caught in such an effort should be charged with treason and locked up for life.
You, fella, are going through life with blinders on for who knows what reason if you intend to make anyone believe solar power is, anything but practical. The technology drops in price every year, there is a breakthrough called a "nanodot" which can double solar's efficiency, and thousands of homeowners are very satisfied with the effect solar has had on their power bills. More breakthroughs both large and small will continue to increase the efficiencies; and even in cloudy climes such as the UK, solar works well enough to make a difference. I'd very much like to know exactly who you are so that I can tell you "I told you so" not only on the proliferation of solar, but EV acceptance and home energy storage that allows homeowners to run their homes on the energy they collect on their own roofs. Take your negativity elsewhere, there are too many SlashDotters that are realistically optimistic of the future and are working toward sustainable lifestyles.
My god, what kind of an idiot are you?!? You obviously didn't even bother to read the article, in which it says the asteroid is estimated to be worth 5.4 TRILLION dollars! That's more than you make all week! Please stop making a fool of yourself, and don't waste my time.
... also, you obviously did not even bother to read my post, since I clearly stated:
"Gold is nice stuff but has limited industrial value". Stop criticizing people if you can't be accurate in what you say. It just makes you look like an idiot.
"Nothing out there..." you are incredibly short-sighted. Just for starters, there have already been two large bodies-- I'm too impatient and lazy to actually look up which ones, but Google it yourself if you care-- found to be nearly pure gold in one case, and platinum in another... the asteroid, as I recall, that was platinum- rich just passed very close to Earth recently. Gold is nice stuff but has limited industrial value; not so of platinum, which is very handy for all manner of instruments and manufacturing equipment.
There are millions of asteroids out there waiting for us to discover what "rare earth elements" (what irony!) they have in abundance. There are dozens of elements on the Periodic Table which would be of huge value to us if we had plentiful stores of them, mined from other bodies in our solar system. But we can't even begin to know without more exploration, and that exploration is not dependent on launch costs we are currently restricted to. If SpaceX manages to develop a reliable way to build totally reusable rockets (as they appear close to realizing), it would reduce the cost of orbital launches by 90% or more. Or, if the Space Elevator ever finds ways of being built... or, if that freaky, UFO-like, EM Drive NASA is embarrassed to say they don't understand and seems impossible but does work, nonetheless... if any of these things become the new reality, the disruption would be beyond game - changing. The EM drive is said to be able to make round - trips to Mars possible in just a matter of weeks, and at just a tiny fraction of the cost as we see it today. All these naysayers I see in this discussion make two enormous mistakes: that exploration will never have any more value than they are capable of seeing as of today... and exploration will never be cheaper than it is in today's world. Both assumptions are as ridiculous as those that claimed aircraft would never be of practical benefit.
You Musk bashers are pitiful dingbats. With thousands of billionaires around with no interest in anything but adding zeroes to the end of their net worth, we're lucky to have Elon and a few precious others that are actually doing something worthwhile with their cash. I could care less about his aspirations to go to Mars, but Tesla and Solar City are both very much in the interests of consumers, especially Americans intent on cutting their dependence on foreign oil, and the terrorism and support for despotic regimes that oil money provides. Without Elon Musk, we would still be decades away from hitting the tipping point for EVs. We NEED to wean ourselves off of gasoline before we end up with something a thousand times worse than the 9/11 attacks.
Uggggh... you sound just like a perfect Ayn Rand acolyte. Let the whole world fail... fire departments, schools, roads and bridges, health care... everything... so long as it means you don't have to pay taxes or do anything that helps society as a whole.
Tons of legacy industries... coal, oil, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, most notably.... were receiving obscenely huge and undeserved subsidies year after year for as much as a hundred years, due to cronyism, back-room deals and pandering. If Solyndra was allowed to fail it was not because it deserved to fail, but only because it was disruptive technology and the technologies it was disrupting had sufficient illicit political assistance in ensuring that Solyndra would be allowed to fail.
Tesla Motors nearly failed by the same lack of support that Solyndra did-- it was perhaps a fluke that they did survive the depths of the recession around 2008, but it is fortunate they did survive. All it would have taken for Solyndra to be a blazing success like Tesla is today would have been for some legislation to have been passed to protect them from the predatory dumping of Chinese competition.
What Axe do you have to grind?
You chastise the one guy who is doing the most to get us off of foreign oil that we buy from our very worst enemies... the same despots that destroyed the Twin Towers and the Pentagon... cretins that still today are unleashing terrorism not just in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Syria, but Australia, Malaysia, France, Britain, and throughout Africa... if we drive EVs, the $450 billion we spend yearly on oil stays here for our schools, hospitals, roads and bridges.
So what is your hidden agenda that you don't point out that the oil industry and the Big Tree car makers have been receiving hundreds of billions in handouts and subsidies for decades, but also conveniently ignore the fact that Tesla borrowed a few hundred million during the depths of the recession and paid it back ahead of time, WITH INTEREST? So, Anonymous Coward, what has made you so transparently biased, and why not tell us who you are and what Musk has you so worried about? Do you want to maintain status quo, rather than the country shifting to EVs? I have two electric vehicles, neither of which is a Tesla. I spend no more money on oil changes, tune-ups, smog tests or tranny service that EVs do not require. My month expenses are virtually nil. What about that has you so eager to attack unfairly?
(Moderator: no, AC is NOT "informative".
I am a longtime regular (biweekly) platelet donor as well-- over 32 gallons of platelets to Children's Hospital Los Angeles, dozens of gallons before that to Red Cross-- but unlike you, my platelet count has never been over about 230, and more typically about 180 or so.
I'm 67 now... have been using the same needle site for many years... I hope I never have the problem you have had, since I take great satisfaction in my donations, and would be quite happy to continue for another few hundred years.
In actual fact, I am confident researchers will eventually make our donations no longer necessary due to some form of synthetic or other substitute, such as genetically engineered platelets (and, plasma, red cells, white cells, etc.) provided by bacteria, plants or other life forms created especially for the purpose.
(I see others on Slashdot can create paragraphs, but when I write anything with paragraphs it appears as a single block of text-- WHY???)
It's not an either/or. DC and AC can be wired into the same house w/out issues... low-voltage DC could be fine for lights and small stuff such as phone chargers, laptops, electronics... but the energy losses from low-voltage DC would still make larger appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, microwaves and hair dryers more efficient to do it as we have been doing it since Tesla (the ORIGINAL Tesla) showed us a century ago. Low-voltage DC still does have its place, though, since it's what LEDs and much of our gadgetry relies on, and is less efficient when a conversion must be negotiated.
Also, it's not just Tesla chargers and Tesla cars that are going to make such changes inevitable. There are thousands of solar installers (including Tesla's sister company, Solar City) who are driving the trend to decentralized power, less reliance on The Grid, a more robust infrastructure, and a complex but more practical means of living. Elon Musk is not the only one driving the agenda forward, but no one can deny he has been the most influential single individual in this space.
Taiwanjohn: the only way you could make, such an inane statement is if you had never had the task of doing anything remotely challenging... only someone that has never taken on a difficult task such as that could, ever make such a ridiculous comment. Try something far, simpler... build a go - kart from scratch, not from a kit or a set of directions, like from Popular Mechanics... or, maybe design and build a simple drone, again without directions... those would be monstrously simpler achievements... do that, and then come back and tell us how teaching robots is so simple. You can be completely sure that a genuinely intelligent, creative, accomplished person would never make such a statement as you have made, and the vast majority of readers realize that. You have been outed, fella, as having a bully mentality!
True; and Big, Business foams at the mouth about how solar and EV- and battery-related R & D is receiving any funding or subsidy at all, yet Big Oil has received trillions in subsidies and other assistance for something like a hundred years now, and they don't want anyone to take note of that.
Sounds like you heavily invested in oil, think it is some kind of panacea, and that the party will never end! Wrong, fella. Recently, gasoline prices spiked here in California because three refineries went offline... one of those refineries went offline strategically, which is to say that the refiners knew that if they took that exact point to do elective upgrades, they knew they would stifle supplies and gain by millions of dollars due to increased demand. Oil companies, whether domestic or foreign, do not have our best interests at heart. And those that champion fracking are foaming at the mouth at environmentalists, despite the fact that now there are areas having earthquakes that never had them before because of fracking, there are ranchers with epidemics of deformed and stillborn livestock in areas where wells are being tainted by fracking, and yet fracking is still not proving to even be financially viable. You are wearing blinders... all that matters to you is the dollar... so long as it's money in your pocket, the rest of the world can go to hell. Solar, on the other hand, does not need to put bucks in your pocket to provide lasting stability for everyone... Solar does not benefit billionaires year after year the way oil does... Big Business hates solar because... and ONLY because... There is, no way to corner any make the poor poorer (as oil does) and the rich richer (as oil does). Solar power, and cars powered by electricity, have the magical quality of raising all boats equally, not just the rich. Every homeowner with a solar panel on their roof or an EV in their driveway knows that is true.
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They say they have a much larger potential for storage than they are now using... that implies tanks most tanks are empty. I suggest fitting those empty tanks with multiple flexible bladders... say, 8 or ten bladders per tank... the outside walls should be lined with steel fabric such as conventional chain link fencing, so that if the rigid, outer walls are compromised, the steel fencing fabric will hopefully still be able to contain the bladders with their content. Fill that tank with its bladders with oil from one of the other tanks, and retrofit each other tank one at a time until all are upgraded. It would be expensive, but would be about the same thing as spending the money New Orleans really needed to prevent the worst of the Katrina disaster that we still have not recovered from. An ounce of prevention... blah, blah, blah. We need to stop spending so much money recovering from disasters, and use forethought.
You are exceedingly delusional. If solar were not competitive, there would not be thousands of people every day installing panels on the roofs of their houses in, So Cal, and with something just starting to come online called "quantum dots", solar power can soon become economically feasible even in the cloudier states in the northwest... in fact, solar power is already becoming a major player in places such as England and, Wales, which are cloudy much of the day. Stuff your cynicism... figure out what it is you are so damned afraid of seeing the world become more efficient and viable, because you are seeing a skewed picture that does not agree with reality. Wake up and stop trying so desperately to scare people into thinking there are no answers for a better and saner future.
If what you think is true, the popularity of EVs would not be surging. Driving EVs in So Cal for years, "range aanxiety " is of little consequence... there are "fast chargers" that can give many of today's EVs 80% of their capacity in 15 or 30 minutes; tweaking of battery chemistries (of which there are different chemistries among the dozens of various car makers) has meant a steady upward creep in range, and entities like MIT, IBM, Stanford, and dozens of other major players are jockeying to come up with the next major breakthrough battery. Some of them are tantalizing close to chemistries that would allow a car to trip from L.A. to Atlanta on a single charge. Other approaches may make it possible to recharge in no more time than it takes to refuel a car today. And when it comes to a buck or two (or even free electricity in some cases), a lot of people are wuite willing to spend a few minutes to charge rather than spend forty or fifty bucks (or even more for an SUV) on gasoline. No matter how you try to imagine EVs as not being ready to bl9ssom in popularity, all you have to do is see just how satisfied EV owners are today, and how much more satisfied they will be as tech improves, which it will.
I've been driving EVs for a few years now, and it is quite different than most people assume that do not own or drive EVs. As, for "free" and "charge-to-charge", anyone that drives EVs eventually realizes that "free" won't last forever, and the "free" is in large part to encourage and reward drivers for making the big step to change from ICE to EV. One of the curious aspects of this evolution is that the roads and bridges and related infrastructure is, paid, for by gas taxes; that means we EV drivers are paying nothing to drive on public roads since we buy no gssoline. But as the numbers of EV drivers swell, that has to change at, some point-- the cost of a new EV from the showroom will continue to drop due to the continuous drop in the cost of the batteries that power them, since billions are being spent yearly to tweak and, refine and research battery tech. In a few months, Tesla's 5 billion - dollar battery factory ("Gigafactory") will be online, and so batteries-- and, EVs-- will suddenly start to drop in price even more. It is expected that EVs-- which are more powerful, far simpler, less expensive to maintain and more convenient in many ways-- will creep lower and lower in price until they may eventually be even less expensive than ICE cars. Long before they hit that point, though, there will be a huge shift to abandon gasoline in favor of electrons. There will be a certain degree of growing pains, but as EVs become more commonplace, many things will change for the better, including the collapse of the Oil Gluttons... many people will be driving EVs with power they generate on their own roofs, and living expenses will dramatically decrease. One likely problem will be an increase in road traffic, due to lower costs of driving, but traffic accidents will drop significantly because of computerized collision avoidance and other similar tech... self-driving cars.
Sorry, but you obviously do not have an EV, and do not have any first - hand knowledge of EV charging infrastructure, or how the electricity is paid for. I have two EVs; the electricity I get at home I pay less for than if I was driving with gasoline, and I never will again have to spend days and a thousand dollars or more trying to get it to pass smog as i have done too many times in the past; no more oil changes, spark plugs, replacement mufflers, oil changes, air filters, oil filters, and, wasted time in repair shops, etc: nearly zero maintenance. The electricity I get when out during the day varies-- there are Costco stores, Starbucks, Nordstroms, city halls and other places that provide free charging while shopping, eating or doing business. Pollution is a REAL thing with REAL consequences; when I came to L.A. In 1970 the pollution was so bad I did not know there were mountains in the area for months, until there was a rain hard enough to clear the air so I could see them. Today, the mountains are always visible. Responsible city leaders know that when the air is clean we have fewer people in the emergency rooms for asthma and emphysema and heart attacks; good air means less money spent on health care, and people are healthier. So many cities provide some free public charging stations to encourage EV use. There are also thousands of pay charging stations as well, but they do not work as you incorrectly guessed. They are part of a seamless system where I simply pull up, plug in my car, and wave a little plastic key chain card over the charging station, which immediately allows the car to begin charging. Unlike your supposition, if someone disconnects my cable, my car stops charging, but the charging network knows it, and will not allow that other person to charge up on my credit. I have an account with "ChargePoint" which makes everything super easy and seamless, such as notifying me by text message when my car is finished charging, and, how, much credit I, have left on the sydtem. I can also instantaneously add more credit to my account to pay for my electricity from a credit card or bank account. It is far more convenient than putting up with noxious fumes at gas stations, and the hundreds of dollars a month I'd have to be paying for gasoline. I will never go back to ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles.
Idiot cynics such as yourself are disgusting. I converted a BMW to a powerful, fully electric vehicle back before there were Teslas or other EVs to buy on the market. I did NOT do it to make myself look superior to you of, anyone else. I have two EVs now, and take satisfaction in knowing I am contributing to the hundreds of billions of dollars yearly we spend on foreign oil; it is unavoidable that a certain percentage of that money goes to terrible people, just as terrible as Osama bin Laden, who use that money to do terrible things like funding terrorism and shoe bombers and underwear bombers and suicide bombers in countries all over the world. When we drive EVs, we are getting the power we use to drive from LOCAL sources-- generating plants, or hydroelectric plants, or maybe solar panels on the roof of my home. In any case, there is no money going overseas to fund terrible things... if we all decided to stop driving with gasoline, we would suddenly have hundreds of billions of dollars available to spend on our bospitals, schools, roads and bridges and balancing our national debt. Get your head out of your butt and stop thinking that every time someone does something positive in the world, it is just to help give you reasons to be even more cynical, asinine and antisocial.
UGGGH!!! "some drag", yes! In fact, the drag you create would be GREATER than the current you would reap from such a system... guaranteed. Find any small hand-crank generator designed to charge a battery or give you some light. Connect it to any load, such as an old-style tungsten 60-watt bulb... crank it under load... have someone disconnect the load as you crank... you will note it will be immediately easier to crank... the more electric load you put on the generator, the harder it will be to crank. If you put any kind of turbine blade on the car to generate electricity, it will create significant drag while driving... in other words, there is no free lunch. Unless, of course, you have it generating while the car is sitting still, or if you have solar panels on your roof-- but they won't give you significant amounts of electricity. If you put solar cells all over the roof, for instance, it would only be useful for keeping your car ventilated a bit while you were at work or at the market, which is what some EV makers are already doing.
MOOT!!! No basis for your nattering in the least! This Nissan thingie is being developed only years after Tesla, Google, MB and others have been developing self-driving cars, meaning that by the time it is ready to put in real cars, those cars are likely to be self-driving, anyway, making all this bling of no importance re: road safety. The various teams developing this self-driving tech are in agreement on one thing: it will not be used by the general public until it can be shown to be ten times better than human drivers under identical conditions; Musk says their self-driving cars are already in the ball park, but that they have much more to do-- they want to harden it against hackers, to make the systems massively redundant (currently the systems have about 10 computers linked in serial to make it work, and if any one computer fails it is out of action. Therefore, multiples of multiples will be necessary to satisfy their concerns.)
You really question Americans' support for NASA?!? DUHHH.. the box office receipts for the film under discussion will tell you that. You sound like a total Luddite.
You are hopelessly inept. The only reason there is, any "debate" on the subject of Global Warming and similar eco issues is because oligarch mega - control freaks like the Koch brothers don't respect anything but money and are maniacally obsessed with tacking on more zeroes at the end oof their net worth. Anything such as reducing pollution or crime, or making it easier for a kindergartner to get food in his belly every morning before school... anything at all that might get in the way of another dime in their coffers... is to be thrashed out of existence, even if it means spending even more money to defeat commonsense, compassionate efforts. So when the cast majority of scientists say there is global wsrming, they will, spend billions if they have to, to spread the disinformstion, confusion and outright lies to warp the entire landscape, drowning out any common sense, shouting so loudly and profanely and persistently that their own decrepit message is the only one, anyone hears. Thank Fox News, Drudge report et. al for that. So... even though hard science from every direction says one thing, jackass clowns such as Jeb! Bush can be so blatantly idiotic as to tell the Pope (who has a degree in, chemistry, which Jeb! does not-- that the Pope needs to stick to relidgin, and keep his nose out of science. And why?! Because Jeb! and his ilk decide what is most in the interest of the 1%, and anything such as the vast majority of scientists must be wrong if they disagree with those swine that want to swallow the entire planet. Tea Partiers and the most radical elements of the GOP become more rabid with every passing day, tearing thecflesh, from their own kind, such as Boehner, who they vilify just because he couldn't find a, way to trash the entire political process, and force the majority of, America to accept the warped, insane, demands of these cretins. I fully expect them to try to steal the election again as they did with their hanging chads, voter role manipulations and other perversions of the Democratic process, and whoever is caught in such an effort should be charged with treason and locked up for life.
You, fella, are going through life with blinders on for who knows what reason if you intend to make anyone believe solar power is, anything but practical. The technology drops in price every year, there is a breakthrough called a "nanodot" which can double solar's efficiency, and thousands of homeowners are very satisfied with the effect solar has had on their power bills. More breakthroughs both large and small will continue to increase the efficiencies; and even in cloudy climes such as the UK, solar works well enough to make a difference. I'd very much like to know exactly who you are so that I can tell you "I told you so" not only on the proliferation of solar, but EV acceptance and home energy storage that allows homeowners to run their homes on the energy they collect on their own roofs. Take your negativity elsewhere, there are too many SlashDotters that are realistically optimistic of the future and are working toward sustainable lifestyles.
My god, what kind of an idiot are you?!? You obviously didn't even bother to read the article, in which it says the asteroid is estimated to be worth 5.4 TRILLION dollars! That's more than you make all week! Please stop making a fool of yourself, and don't waste my time.
... also, you obviously did not even bother to read my post, since I clearly stated: "Gold is nice stuff but has limited industrial value". Stop criticizing people if you can't be accurate in what you say. It just makes you look like an idiot.
You, fella, are the one, eho, needs to check your facts. It took me all of five seconds to find multiple articles for both gold and platinum-rich asteroids. https://news.ycombinator.com/i... https://www.rt.com/news/310170...
BTW... how do you make "paragraph breaks?"
"Nothing out there..." you are incredibly short-sighted. Just for starters, there have already been two large bodies-- I'm too impatient and lazy to actually look up which ones, but Google it yourself if you care-- found to be nearly pure gold in one case, and platinum in another... the asteroid, as I recall, that was platinum- rich just passed very close to Earth recently. Gold is nice stuff but has limited industrial value; not so of platinum, which is very handy for all manner of instruments and manufacturing equipment. There are millions of asteroids out there waiting for us to discover what "rare earth elements" (what irony!) they have in abundance. There are dozens of elements on the Periodic Table which would be of huge value to us if we had plentiful stores of them, mined from other bodies in our solar system. But we can't even begin to know without more exploration, and that exploration is not dependent on launch costs we are currently restricted to. If SpaceX manages to develop a reliable way to build totally reusable rockets (as they appear close to realizing), it would reduce the cost of orbital launches by 90% or more. Or, if the Space Elevator ever finds ways of being built... or, if that freaky, UFO-like, EM Drive NASA is embarrassed to say they don't understand and seems impossible but does work, nonetheless... if any of these things become the new reality, the disruption would be beyond game - changing. The EM drive is said to be able to make round - trips to Mars possible in just a matter of weeks, and at just a tiny fraction of the cost as we see it today. All these naysayers I see in this discussion make two enormous mistakes: that exploration will never have any more value than they are capable of seeing as of today... and exploration will never be cheaper than it is in today's world. Both assumptions are as ridiculous as those that claimed aircraft would never be of practical benefit.
You Musk bashers are pitiful dingbats. With thousands of billionaires around with no interest in anything but adding zeroes to the end of their net worth, we're lucky to have Elon and a few precious others that are actually doing something worthwhile with their cash. I could care less about his aspirations to go to Mars, but Tesla and Solar City are both very much in the interests of consumers, especially Americans intent on cutting their dependence on foreign oil, and the terrorism and support for despotic regimes that oil money provides. Without Elon Musk, we would still be decades away from hitting the tipping point for EVs. We NEED to wean ourselves off of gasoline before we end up with something a thousand times worse than the 9/11 attacks.
The paranoids are after us!!!
Uggggh... you sound just like a perfect Ayn Rand acolyte. Let the whole world fail... fire departments, schools, roads and bridges, health care... everything... so long as it means you don't have to pay taxes or do anything that helps society as a whole. Tons of legacy industries... coal, oil, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, most notably.... were receiving obscenely huge and undeserved subsidies year after year for as much as a hundred years, due to cronyism, back-room deals and pandering. If Solyndra was allowed to fail it was not because it deserved to fail, but only because it was disruptive technology and the technologies it was disrupting had sufficient illicit political assistance in ensuring that Solyndra would be allowed to fail. Tesla Motors nearly failed by the same lack of support that Solyndra did-- it was perhaps a fluke that they did survive the depths of the recession around 2008, but it is fortunate they did survive. All it would have taken for Solyndra to be a blazing success like Tesla is today would have been for some legislation to have been passed to protect them from the predatory dumping of Chinese competition.
What Axe do you have to grind? You chastise the one guy who is doing the most to get us off of foreign oil that we buy from our very worst enemies... the same despots that destroyed the Twin Towers and the Pentagon... cretins that still today are unleashing terrorism not just in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Syria, but Australia, Malaysia, France, Britain, and throughout Africa... if we drive EVs, the $450 billion we spend yearly on oil stays here for our schools, hospitals, roads and bridges. So what is your hidden agenda that you don't point out that the oil industry and the Big Tree car makers have been receiving hundreds of billions in handouts and subsidies for decades, but also conveniently ignore the fact that Tesla borrowed a few hundred million during the depths of the recession and paid it back ahead of time, WITH INTEREST? So, Anonymous Coward, what has made you so transparently biased, and why not tell us who you are and what Musk has you so worried about? Do you want to maintain status quo, rather than the country shifting to EVs? I have two electric vehicles, neither of which is a Tesla. I spend no more money on oil changes, tune-ups, smog tests or tranny service that EVs do not require. My month expenses are virtually nil. What about that has you so eager to attack unfairly? (Moderator: no, AC is NOT "informative".
I am a longtime regular (biweekly) platelet donor as well-- over 32 gallons of platelets to Children's Hospital Los Angeles, dozens of gallons before that to Red Cross-- but unlike you, my platelet count has never been over about 230, and more typically about 180 or so. I'm 67 now... have been using the same needle site for many years... I hope I never have the problem you have had, since I take great satisfaction in my donations, and would be quite happy to continue for another few hundred years. In actual fact, I am confident researchers will eventually make our donations no longer necessary due to some form of synthetic or other substitute, such as genetically engineered platelets (and, plasma, red cells, white cells, etc.) provided by bacteria, plants or other life forms created especially for the purpose. (I see others on Slashdot can create paragraphs, but when I write anything with paragraphs it appears as a single block of text-- WHY???)
It's not an either/or. DC and AC can be wired into the same house w/out issues... low-voltage DC could be fine for lights and small stuff such as phone chargers, laptops, electronics... but the energy losses from low-voltage DC would still make larger appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, microwaves and hair dryers more efficient to do it as we have been doing it since Tesla (the ORIGINAL Tesla) showed us a century ago. Low-voltage DC still does have its place, though, since it's what LEDs and much of our gadgetry relies on, and is less efficient when a conversion must be negotiated. Also, it's not just Tesla chargers and Tesla cars that are going to make such changes inevitable. There are thousands of solar installers (including Tesla's sister company, Solar City) who are driving the trend to decentralized power, less reliance on The Grid, a more robust infrastructure, and a complex but more practical means of living. Elon Musk is not the only one driving the agenda forward, but no one can deny he has been the most influential single individual in this space.
Taiwanjohn: the only way you could make, such an inane statement is if you had never had the task of doing anything remotely challenging... only someone that has never taken on a difficult task such as that could, ever make such a ridiculous comment. Try something far, simpler... build a go - kart from scratch, not from a kit or a set of directions, like from Popular Mechanics... or, maybe design and build a simple drone, again without directions... those would be monstrously simpler achievements... do that, and then come back and tell us how teaching robots is so simple. You can be completely sure that a genuinely intelligent, creative, accomplished person would never make such a statement as you have made, and the vast majority of readers realize that. You have been outed, fella, as having a bully mentality!
True; and Big, Business foams at the mouth about how solar and EV- and battery-related R & D is receiving any funding or subsidy at all, yet Big Oil has received trillions in subsidies and other assistance for something like a hundred years now, and they don't want anyone to take note of that.
Sounds like you heavily invested in oil, think it is some kind of panacea, and that the party will never end! Wrong, fella. Recently, gasoline prices spiked here in California because three refineries went offline... one of those refineries went offline strategically, which is to say that the refiners knew that if they took that exact point to do elective upgrades, they knew they would stifle supplies and gain by millions of dollars due to increased demand. Oil companies, whether domestic or foreign, do not have our best interests at heart. And those that champion fracking are foaming at the mouth at environmentalists, despite the fact that now there are areas having earthquakes that never had them before because of fracking, there are ranchers with epidemics of deformed and stillborn livestock in areas where wells are being tainted by fracking, and yet fracking is still not proving to even be financially viable. You are wearing blinders... all that matters to you is the dollar... so long as it's money in your pocket, the rest of the world can go to hell. Solar, on the other hand, does not need to put bucks in your pocket to provide lasting stability for everyone... Solar does not benefit billionaires year after year the way oil does... Big Business hates solar because... and ONLY because... There is, no way to corner any make the poor poorer (as oil does) and the rich richer (as oil does). Solar power, and cars powered by electricity, have the magical quality of raising all boats equally, not just the rich. Every homeowner with a solar panel on their roof or an EV in their driveway knows that is true.