Also this is more efficient, it allows robbers to target more houses that it was possible before.
That's exactly how a PhD would approach robbing a house - by collecting scientific data, analyzing it, and then offering a hypothesis (you are at home or not.)
However real life thieves do it in a better way. They throw a brick through the rear door and disappear. If nothing happens within 15-20 minutes then they know that all of the following is true: nobody is at home; there is no alarm; there are no dogs; the neighbors heard nothing. Then the house is safe to approach.
You see, there is no need to know if neighbors are at home or not. This is useless information. What is not useless, however, is whether they hear the commotion or not. Similarly, it is pointless to know if you are at home or not. An alarm may be at home in your place, guarding better than you would. The method that thieves use checks for the end condition directly - and it requires minimum IQ.
So your claim is it will downshift when going down a steep grade to allow for engine braking?
My Prius with CVT also does it - every time, as matter of fact, when I leave home and go down to the valley. (It does that only after it fully charges the battery.) There is the 'B' mode of the transmission that engages engine braking, so you can choose between limiting the speed and accelerating downhill, depending on the road ahead. In the case of Prius this is possible because the car knows in which direction the power flows - from the engines to the wheels, or in reverse.
Are there any car brands that do not do this? I would prefer never to buy such a car.
Yugo (assuming that it's still alive) doesn't do this. Mercedes does. Which car will you buy if the cost is not a factor? What is more important to you - encryption of data that you will likely never see, or quality that you will enjoy every day?
The Feds have no business giving a fuck what's under the hood, just how much pollution comes out the exhaust and evaporative emission control systems!
The Feds want to be sure that you don't flip a switch right after you leave the testing station and don't turn your fully compliant engine into a pollution-spewing demon's ride.
There is, though, something that you will miss if you have only one card. You cannot decide what charges go to what card. For example, I have one company c/c, one personal c/c and one bank charge card. I cannot combine the first two, obviously. The latter is used for authentication when I visit the bank. This leaves me with the same three cards, plus the Google card.
Also, not everyone is so fortunate to have unlimited credit and infinite supply of money to pay it off. They know when billing cycles occur on cards; if they are different, it can allow you to time purchases so that you get a free month of credit, plus free 20 days to pay it off with no extra fees. If one of your cards is close to the limit you set it aside and take another card. Some cards give you bonus points; other cards give you other benefits - the card issuers compete with each other on these services. If you keep only one card as the preferred one then you may just cancel the other cards; why to bother if they are not used? They are only a liability at that point.
Sure, knowing that you bought gas or coffee is probably not that interesting to anyone. But never buy anything interesting with a card if you can use cash.
There is another reply just above with words "this is more likely to save me than to convict me." The point is that this system can be gamed. Not only the prosecution can access your records, but the defense can do that as well. If someone wants to steal an item from a faraway location he can do at least two things. First, he will not buy fuel with the credit card on the way there and back. Second, he will have someone to use his credit card in his home town while he is doing the crime. Only about 2% of stores ask for ID when you pay with c/c - and there are plenty that never do (nor they could do that, given the lines and the small amounts of money being paid.) These records would serve as an alibi. Not only the prosecution requested this info and found nothing, they have to give this info to the defense - and the defense can use it to assist the client. Add to that the fact that the client's phone was registering in his home town all day, and the location was consistent with the c/c purchases. Now you have the prosecution team on defense.
the electric assist allowed a relatively unfit journalist to keep up
It didn't appear to me that the journalist is "relatively unfit" if he writes this:
I am a speed freak, so when I found myself on a nice, open stretch of road, the first thing I did was start the motor at full throttle and pedal like a madman at the same time. [...] However, my attempt to go any faster than 50 km/h (30 mph) left me frustrated -- the vehicle lacks the high gears needed for those speeds.
If at 30 mph he was wishing for a higher gear then I suppose he had more stamina in him than most unfit men that I ever met, including, of course, myself as a star exhibit of an unfit man:-)
By the way, the article mentions that the battery and the motor only weigh 5 kg. That is, as he says, a surprisingly low weight for 200+ watts, and I agree. Perhaps then what is missing in this contraption is a 500 Wh battery and a 500W motor, so that plain folks, who are not riders at all, can take this thing for a spin to the corner store and back - without ever touching the pedals because there are none. That would be a far better seller, IMO, than the pedaled version - an EV has a wider audience, as long as the price is right. (No, the Eur 8K is not right.)
Since car headlamps have to light up rather farther out (for top legal speeds of 75mph vs 25mph)
Bicycle riders going downhill need all the light they can get. There are places nearby that gather their toll of crashed riders every week. (Many crashes occur in daylight, though - the road is winding and the downslope is steep.)
You are right about higher efficiency of modern headlights. My car has 2 x 35W HID headlights, and your single 45W LED light could well be brighter than that. But that's still some serious power. Where on a bike do you get this much power from? Not from the rear wheel, I suppose? Your muscles produce only 100W over 1 hour, per TFA. Riders around here do use lights, but they are just 2-3W LED lights that are barely legal; they are powered from a battery.
Yes, they are pretty bad. I used to have a bicycle with a mirror, and I rarely could see anything in that mirror because it vibrated too much.
a wide-angle backup cam under the seat and an LCD on the bars is better.
You need to use an LCD that works at full sunlight and in pitch black. I think there are a few technologies that are promising, but so far what we have is inadequate. I have an LCD monitor in my car, and it is not fun to look at when it's bright outside - even though it has an excellent backlight. Oh, power-wise it has to be very efficient on a bike.
Look at a motorcycle -- they can take imperfect roads at rather higher speeds with 6" clearance.
I used to own a scooter with a pretty low clearance; it was only fit for city streets - and watch for those potholes! Racing motorbikes are designed for racetracks. A dirt bike will take you anywhere.
to let the poor bloke who can go 20 miles at 10mph do 40 miles at 20mph?
It remains to be seen if electric assist has any effect in this thing. TFA says that two vehicles were tested, one with electric motor and another without, and they were performing identically.
Think about it this way also. TFA provides calculations of the efficiency of the vehicle. 100W from the driver + 250W from the motor seem to be a great idea. But it all depends on the weight of the electric powertrain. A skinny rider on an unpowered bike will be far faster than the same skinny rider who carries the fiberglass shell, the battery and the motor in addition to the bike's parts. If the rider's weight is 300 lbs then perhaps the battery's weight is not that critical; but riders with those characteristics prefer Harleys:-)
Finally, TFA clearly spells it out: "The electric motor is intended to be used for acceleration only (and for climbing hills)." This is counter to the theory that a casual rider can use the motor instead of pedaling. The battery (288Wh) would be good for more than 2 hours, isn't it so? But for some reason this is not the mode that they tested. Perhaps this vehicle lacks the transmission (electric or mechanical) that would be required to handle the full range of torque? But whenever you are NOT using the electric assist you are hauling all that extra weight for naught. That would be a big loss in overall efficiency. Prius, for example, is using battery power whenever it is not charging the battery; Toyota's designers understood well that you must use the battery, otherwise you'd be better off losing it.
Try to avoid the personal attacks in your replies.
That was mostly unintentional. I added "but" to the phrase "But who are you..." to make it into a rhetorical device, but obviously that was insufficient. Sorry about that; I was too quick to post a poorly formulated - and poorly designed - response.
Good collection of links! But many of these videos are outright scary. Note the windshield is covered in water - is there a wiper? Two crashes were shown; one is a minor bump of no consequence to any vehicle; another was a series of photos where the smaller vehicle was seriously damaged and overturned. Given tight quarters, the driver could be hurt even from that. Lack of crumple zones and small weight means that in a high speed collision the whole vehicle is accelerated to the speed of the other car in milliseconds, with enormous G forces. Most of the length of the car is occupied by your body, and your legs are only protected with a paper-thin decorative epoxy layer. A driver of a bus may not even notice your "car" down below, as he drives his huge vehicle all over you. A larger car would be better visible, and in case of a collision it would be only pushed aside - not driven over.
With regard to headlights, I cannot imagine having 2x100W headlights in such small vehicles - the battery alone would be prohibitive. What I saw in the video was more like 2x10W light bulbs, not really enough to see and be seen at night - except in a well-lit city.
With regard to age, that older guy is obviously in a better shape, physically, than I am. I know plenty of people with blood pressure problems and other ailments who are not advised to exert themselves. One needs to be healthy to do this thing; and you cannot take this vehicle for a casual 100 mile spin like I intend to do tomorrow, in a car, to visit a friend in another city.
Comments to some videos specifically mention that you get all sweaty even in cold weather. This is a dangerous combination!
Even for a very fit driver, 50 km/h seems to be a high speed,
This is one of my personal concerns about bicycle riders. They pedal so hard that they can't look around - they are too busy. On a motorbike it's not a problem, your body is free to lean and look back. This vehicle at least helps with that problem because it is inherently stable.
I'm not sure whether these would be allowed on the bike network in my city.
This vehicle is not very likely to fit into most bike lanes. And it is not suitable for bike paths that are not perfectly flat (with only 6" of clearance it got to be perfect.) I am not sure what major advantage would an avid bicycle rider have with this one if electric assist is not effective at speed. Most riders do OK at low speeds on their own.
You'd want to have somewhere to keep it locked up and safe, though.
You might just as well drop 8,000 euros on the ground and walk away:-) IMO, this ridiculous price is only to harvest the early crop of rich fools. Then the price is halved, and the new set of fools are harvested, and so on - until the price drops to some realistic number, like $300. That, IMO, would be a fair price for a crude bicycle under a cheap fiberglass shell, with a battery and a DC motor from a handheld vacuum cleaner of the variety that is sold for $25 in drug stores.
This vehicle combines the worst parts of bicycle experience with the worst parts of car experience. It only can be used to deliver your body from point A to point B - even though many, if not most, trips require carrying cargo (even as little as a laptop bag; but often groceries are also required.) This works only on absolutely flat land, and in good weather. In case of an accident your body will be neatly squashed by wheels of larger vehicles, making it a death trap. There are no creature comforts, such as a/c or radio or headlights, which makes it dangerous to drive at high temperatures (half of the year in half of the USA) or at night (other half of the year in another half of the USA.) Usability-wise, it's another Ginger (Segway,) only even less practical. Only well trained young men can ride the thing. Children cannot use it; older persons cannot use it; women, being statistically weaker, cannot use them. Even tired people, after a full day of honest work, may not need another exercise on their way home. Riders will arrive to their destinations soaked in sweat, stinking, dusty; their arms and legs will be shaking from exertion, and it will take some time for them to cool down and be ready to work at the office. All in all, this is yet another fringe vehicle for the same, well known fringe group that insists that public roads are their personal gym.
It may be not as simple to stomp the BC out. But ultimately yes, BC exists only at the pleasure of authorities. It is also a useful testbed for the government's control over such things. A BC activist on the Internet is just like an anti-government activist on the Internet. So if you learn now to identify the former you will be well prepared to deal with the latter. As all the world's societies slowly collapse onto themselves, like a star, the need for such means of control become more and more necessary (at least from the point of view of governments.) In essence, the future looks pretty dark; you can choose between the infinitely free world of Mad Max, if you are lucky, and the fascist society like 1984. All the countries in the world exhibit this trend because they are not politically willing to accept the natural solution - which is invariably bloody.
You could have millions of USD in Bitcoins but as long as you refuse to hand over your wallet, they will never know or be able to prove this.
Your [way of thinking is ] wrong. If I were the government I'd do this.
Phase 0. All financial accounts have to be registered with the government. This is already done for you by the banks. Now the government simply extends this requirement to Bitcoin.
Phase 1. Some Bitcoin holders register - and they are safe for now. You do not register. Read on.
Phase 2. The government starts monitoring Bitcoin transactions *and* the Internet. It becomes trivial to note that your IP generated some transaction and it got registered in the network. If you dare to walk to a store and buy something there with BC, all merchants will of course report your account and the sirens start blaring. You only can use your unregistered account from home or from public places that allow BC traffic (good luck finding those, with a prison term for the owner.) Perhaps a VPN to a foreign server is an option if you keep your wallet there; but those servers will be treated like foreign banks, and they will be requested to open the kimono for the IRS; otherwise they will be utterly destroyed. Even the Swiss government couldn't stand up to the USA; a group of teens in New Zealand have no chance.
Phase 3. The government accuses you of tax evasion. Your computer is seized and the wallet discovered. If you remain silent then the government's assertion that you transferred $big_bucks to another account stands unopposed, and you go to prison. If you do not remain silent and reveal the wallet's password then the government has you for whatever you did; you may be even released if there is no crime - but your fate will be a lesson to other Bitcoin revolutionaries.
Note that Phases 0 and 1 are *already* in effect. If you fill your tax forms yourself you probably saw a requirement there to report all foreign financial accounts that you control. This requirement is there for many years now, to fight the massive tax evasion by holders of accounts in Swiss banks. BC will be one such financial account, for sure (because it is - your money is held on the Internet, outside of the country.) Failure to disclose will result in an audit by a group of armed IRS agents. This is something that a prepared man can survive; but the vast majority of BC refuseniks will not be prepared men - and they will go down, fast and hard.
Try to buy a house with cash; or land; or a company; or a ship. Try even to place an order for industrial parts and pay with cash. Many businesses are not set up to deal with cash.
Cash is only accepted for small transactions, those that do not matter in the big picture. That's why money laundering is a big business; it wouldn't be so if anyone could drive a trailer full of money bags to a bank and say that you want to make a deposit.
Even using cash for everyday purchases is getting more and more difficult. Give someone a $100 bill and be looked at with suspicion, and the bill - tested. Give someone a $1000 bill and you will likely be arrested until the police finds out that those bills do, in fact, exist. Want to buy gas? There is no attendant on duty, and the pumps only accept plastic. Want to use a parking facility? Go find the only exit that has a human cashier; all other exits are automated.
There is a very good reason for all that. The society benefits from automation of money-counting. It takes a human clerk to count your money - and there will be occasional mistakes. But when the cash register sends a transaction for $14.99 then the money charged will be exactly that - not more, not less. People also benefit from having safe access to all or most of their finances without the need to carry the cash in their pockets. Electronic money is also safe from counterfeiting; it never falls through the hole in your pocket; you will not be shortchanged, and you will not leave the coins as a tip.
But, of course, plastic is only your fair weather friend. Come TEOTWAWKI, and all your money has to be in your personal posession. Chances are, though, that after a SHTF event the old paper bills will not be very valuable - there are just too many of them, and they can be counterfeited or stolen en masse from banks' vaults, and in SHTF conditions it will be nearly impossible to understand what the value of money is. Essentially, if you give someone food for a $100 bill you'd better be sure someone else will give you 10 rounds of ammo for the same piece of paper. With the government out of the picture, nobody can be forced to accept that money; they need to be given good reasons to do so. One condition is that the printing presses (wherever they remain in operation) must not print more paper. But after TEOTWAWKI everyone who has access to these presses will do exactly that.
it is critically important that their trade order makes it over the wire in 0.001 seconds, rather than 0.006 seconds
If a lot worth of $100M falls down to $50M within a minute, each additional millisecond costs you about a thousand dollars. As more and more trading is done directly by computers that are loosely guided by traders, the prices can swing up or down as fast as those computers can generate trades. The firm with the fastest computer will have an advantage. If several computers are participating in that $100M to $50M event and the price drops not in one minute but in 1 second then each millisecond will cost you $50K. A firm with a reasonably fast computer can just sit on the stock exchange all day and collect money from every move in prices before that move is even noticed by humans. Buy 1M shares for $100.0 each and sell them five seconds later for $100.001... you just earned $1,000 in five seconds by sitting next to your computer and doing nothing. Since computer can do this to all stocks that exhibit interesting trends, you can make money hand over fist. And they do.
Now, Microsoft could certainly change their business plan, at least for gadgets, but wouldn't they have had to start, oh, a decade ago?
Lost time is just one aspect of the problem. They have worse demons than that. For example:
Windows was always Microsoft's cash cow. Generations of employees came and went working on that cow. It is engrained into MS's thinking that Windows == MS and MS == Windows. But these days MS has to accept that they are quickly losing dominance. You know what my desktop will be in 10 years? It will be probably Android-based, with or without overlapping windows (as needed, depending on the size of the monitor.) What is there in Windows that Android does not deliver? But think now, can MS give up on the future of its primary product? What will shareholders say to that? This is exactly why Ballmer is locked into the old vicious cycle of crossing desktops and tablets and then wondering why nothing works. MS as a company cannot think outside of their Windows box. Apple could - and it won the world.
Microsoft is not staffed with geniuses. MS people are, by and large, regular coders. They just know *everything* about the environment they operate in. But geniuses they are not. Take their advantages away and they are just as helpless as a startup who hired 10,000 random coders off the street.
And once you get to that point, MS will not be any better than anyone else. Except that they are ten years behind and they have no clue. MS is a large, old company. It is not like Google where inventive behavior was (or is) promoted. MS earned its money not by being creative but by being prolific. Mountains of code were written to do mundane tasks (MS Exchange, AD, and every other aspect of the server.) It is not fun, and it is not interesting. But it was profitable because enterprise paid them for developing all these functions over the years. MS is like a tank. But it's heavy and needs a lot of fuel. The world is not experiencing its best days; sales of existing MS software are not expected to skyrocket. 3rd world would gladly pirate all that they can - because they can't afford to buy anyway. MS would have to be very inventive to find something new to sell; but MS does not invent - not now, not ever. They are just plain slow.
This cathedral of MS still stands. But we already can see that when MS is forced to invent they invent poorly. Nobody in his right mind would make Metro a mandatory function. I bet it wouldn't be too hard to launch Metro environment whenever it is needed, and one could be minimized, and one could have more than one Metro environment if only anyone wanted that. But no, they decided that their only way is the true way, and everything else is heresy that ought to be eradicated. They even removed the "Start" button. You know what? I had the Media Center icon there in my test setup of Win8, and I can't even count how many times I clicked on it wanting to bring up the Start menu. How hard would it be to keep a component that you already have and that works just fine? I'm not always an idiot; I simply don't even think when I want to access the power menu or the control panel or my pinned applications. Years of the "Start something!" training bore fruit.
When you combine all these factors you will see that MS's future lies in maintenance of legacy software, of which they churned up a lot. If a small office now needs a mail+groupware server, that'd be MS Exchange. MS will sell that. But many clients of that server will be iPhones, iPads, Androids, and everything in between. Desktops with Windows will remain in production because too much essential software is locked into Windows and cannot be moved anywhere. But in an average company you will have one such engineering desktop for three or five mobile terminals. A company that sells clothes wouldn't need even one Windows machine. If they need a database, they can rent one for cheap, and if they need a custom client, that is just as easy to develop for a tablet as it is for Windows. (WPF with dat
Android is as cheap as it ever going to be ($zero.) Is MS going to pay OEMs for using their Win8?
Windows RT is going to cost an estimated $85 per copy to your average OEM. A Windows 8 Professional license on x86 will be considerably more. [link]
I can buy a whole tablet now for $99 or even less, and - imagine that - the hardware is included in the price!
Google can release Android for free because it is not the product, it's the grease in the data mining machine that Google runs. The daily bread does not come from Android OEMs, it comes from billions of ad clicks and other services. But MS cannot do that, they are a software house and they can't give their software away. As result they will not be able to compete. I cannot imagine why they even entered this market - this is a race to the bottom, and the software is already comfortably sitting at that bottom.
If I were MS I would be porting MS own products to Android and iOS. That's where MS's wares are viable. MS Office for Android - the true office - would be a killer application. Days of Windows are numbered, and while Windows will bring many more millions of dollars in revenue, its end is visible. Tablets are running on free software already. What's the point of even going there?
and they cost a fraction of the apps for Android, iOS or WP7
That would be possible only if you compare apples to oranges. A modern street navigation application for Android is a tad more complex than a calculator for Windows Mobile. If you go for complex software for WM then they were just as expensive as anything else. I know because I still run Alk's CoPilot on one of Windows Mobile devices (Dell Axim XV50.)
ISVs have no interest to sponsor a particular OS. If they port their application to X, Y and Z, the price will be about the same on all of them. Most of the cost is not in tools or in registration with Apple and not in signing keys. Most of the cost is in labor.
As long as they have telephone and internet access thay can do their jobs by telecommuting.
There may be many reasons why that's not possible. Traders use very specialized systems (hardware and software) to do their job. Administrators have access to highly confidential information. Many IT people do not want to have it all available on the Internet, even though a well encrypted VPN may be safe enough. One concern is that they don't know who is on the other side of that VPN (who has physical access to your work computer and your work papers.) When traders work in their offices they have security that the company provides (I can't waltz into a major trading firm and look over the shoulder of a senior trader.)
There is also such thing as latency... would your firm accept a loss of $100M just because your DSL was down for a few minutes (a wet cable can do that) and you couldn't sell when the customer is screaming "Sell! Sell! Now!" into your ear. And yes, the issue of communication is also there - traders need to be highly accessible to their bosses and to their customers. A cell phone in a SHTF condition is hardly good enough.
A good telecommuting setup is complex and expensive. Often it involves dedicating a room and installing a company-provided computer there, monitors, telephones, and sometimes a dedicated Internet link. Businesses don't want to share their secrets with your kids and their buddies. A minimalist setup involves a company laptop and a VPN; but that only works in some cases. If you need a desktop with multiple monitors then the situation quickly gets expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
Also this is more efficient, it allows robbers to target more houses that it was possible before.
That's exactly how a PhD would approach robbing a house - by collecting scientific data, analyzing it, and then offering a hypothesis (you are at home or not.)
However real life thieves do it in a better way. They throw a brick through the rear door and disappear. If nothing happens within 15-20 minutes then they know that all of the following is true: nobody is at home; there is no alarm; there are no dogs; the neighbors heard nothing. Then the house is safe to approach.
You see, there is no need to know if neighbors are at home or not. This is useless information. What is not useless, however, is whether they hear the commotion or not. Similarly, it is pointless to know if you are at home or not. An alarm may be at home in your place, guarding better than you would. The method that thieves use checks for the end condition directly - and it requires minimum IQ.
So your claim is it will downshift when going down a steep grade to allow for engine braking?
My Prius with CVT also does it - every time, as matter of fact, when I leave home and go down to the valley. (It does that only after it fully charges the battery.) There is the 'B' mode of the transmission that engages engine braking, so you can choose between limiting the speed and accelerating downhill, depending on the road ahead. In the case of Prius this is possible because the car knows in which direction the power flows - from the engines to the wheels, or in reverse.
Are there any car brands that do not do this? I would prefer never to buy such a car.
Yugo (assuming that it's still alive) doesn't do this. Mercedes does. Which car will you buy if the cost is not a factor? What is more important to you - encryption of data that you will likely never see, or quality that you will enjoy every day?
The Feds have no business giving a fuck what's under the hood, just how much pollution comes out the exhaust and evaporative emission control systems!
The Feds want to be sure that you don't flip a switch right after you leave the testing station and don't turn your fully compliant engine into a pollution-spewing demon's ride.
There is, though, something that you will miss if you have only one card. You cannot decide what charges go to what card. For example, I have one company c/c, one personal c/c and one bank charge card. I cannot combine the first two, obviously. The latter is used for authentication when I visit the bank. This leaves me with the same three cards, plus the Google card.
Also, not everyone is so fortunate to have unlimited credit and infinite supply of money to pay it off. They know when billing cycles occur on cards; if they are different, it can allow you to time purchases so that you get a free month of credit, plus free 20 days to pay it off with no extra fees. If one of your cards is close to the limit you set it aside and take another card. Some cards give you bonus points; other cards give you other benefits - the card issuers compete with each other on these services. If you keep only one card as the preferred one then you may just cancel the other cards; why to bother if they are not used? They are only a liability at that point.
Sure, knowing that you bought gas or coffee is probably not that interesting to anyone. But never buy anything interesting with a card if you can use cash.
There is another reply just above with words "this is more likely to save me than to convict me." The point is that this system can be gamed. Not only the prosecution can access your records, but the defense can do that as well. If someone wants to steal an item from a faraway location he can do at least two things. First, he will not buy fuel with the credit card on the way there and back. Second, he will have someone to use his credit card in his home town while he is doing the crime. Only about 2% of stores ask for ID when you pay with c/c - and there are plenty that never do (nor they could do that, given the lines and the small amounts of money being paid.) These records would serve as an alibi. Not only the prosecution requested this info and found nothing, they have to give this info to the defense - and the defense can use it to assist the client. Add to that the fact that the client's phone was registering in his home town all day, and the location was consistent with the c/c purchases. Now you have the prosecution team on defense.
The idea is that instead of carrying several credit and debit card, you carry one card
Channeling xkcd:
1. You have two cards in your wallet.
2. You get a Google card to combine the two cards into one.
3. Now you have three cards in your wallet.
Google is trying to solve a problem that does not exist.
the electric assist allowed a relatively unfit journalist to keep up
It didn't appear to me that the journalist is "relatively unfit" if he writes this:
I am a speed freak, so when I found myself on a nice, open stretch of road, the first thing I did was start the motor at full throttle and pedal like a madman at the same time. [...] However, my attempt to go any faster than 50 km/h (30 mph) left me frustrated -- the vehicle lacks the high gears needed for those speeds.
If at 30 mph he was wishing for a higher gear then I suppose he had more stamina in him than most unfit men that I ever met, including, of course, myself as a star exhibit of an unfit man :-)
By the way, the article mentions that the battery and the motor only weigh 5 kg. That is, as he says, a surprisingly low weight for 200+ watts, and I agree. Perhaps then what is missing in this contraption is a 500 Wh battery and a 500W motor, so that plain folks, who are not riders at all, can take this thing for a spin to the corner store and back - without ever touching the pedals because there are none. That would be a far better seller, IMO, than the pedaled version - an EV has a wider audience, as long as the price is right. (No, the Eur 8K is not right.)
Since car headlamps have to light up rather farther out (for top legal speeds of 75mph vs 25mph)
Bicycle riders going downhill need all the light they can get. There are places nearby that gather their toll of crashed riders every week. (Many crashes occur in daylight, though - the road is winding and the downslope is steep.)
You are right about higher efficiency of modern headlights. My car has 2 x 35W HID headlights, and your single 45W LED light could well be brighter than that. But that's still some serious power. Where on a bike do you get this much power from? Not from the rear wheel, I suppose? Your muscles produce only 100W over 1 hour, per TFA. Riders around here do use lights, but they are just 2-3W LED lights that are barely legal; they are powered from a battery.
Mirrors are the old and crappy fix;
Yes, they are pretty bad. I used to have a bicycle with a mirror, and I rarely could see anything in that mirror because it vibrated too much.
a wide-angle backup cam under the seat and an LCD on the bars is better.
You need to use an LCD that works at full sunlight and in pitch black. I think there are a few technologies that are promising, but so far what we have is inadequate. I have an LCD monitor in my car, and it is not fun to look at when it's bright outside - even though it has an excellent backlight. Oh, power-wise it has to be very efficient on a bike.
Look at a motorcycle -- they can take imperfect roads at rather higher speeds with 6" clearance.
I used to own a scooter with a pretty low clearance; it was only fit for city streets - and watch for those potholes! Racing motorbikes are designed for racetracks. A dirt bike will take you anywhere.
to let the poor bloke who can go 20 miles at 10mph do 40 miles at 20mph?
It remains to be seen if electric assist has any effect in this thing. TFA says that two vehicles were tested, one with electric motor and another without, and they were performing identically.
Think about it this way also. TFA provides calculations of the efficiency of the vehicle. 100W from the driver + 250W from the motor seem to be a great idea. But it all depends on the weight of the electric powertrain. A skinny rider on an unpowered bike will be far faster than the same skinny rider who carries the fiberglass shell, the battery and the motor in addition to the bike's parts. If the rider's weight is 300 lbs then perhaps the battery's weight is not that critical; but riders with those characteristics prefer Harleys :-)
Finally, TFA clearly spells it out: "The electric motor is intended to be used for acceleration only (and for climbing hills)." This is counter to the theory that a casual rider can use the motor instead of pedaling. The battery (288Wh) would be good for more than 2 hours, isn't it so? But for some reason this is not the mode that they tested. Perhaps this vehicle lacks the transmission (electric or mechanical) that would be required to handle the full range of torque? But whenever you are NOT using the electric assist you are hauling all that extra weight for naught. That would be a big loss in overall efficiency. Prius, for example, is using battery power whenever it is not charging the battery; Toyota's designers understood well that you must use the battery, otherwise you'd be better off losing it.
Try to avoid the personal attacks in your replies.
That was mostly unintentional. I added "but" to the phrase "But who are you..." to make it into a rhetorical device, but obviously that was insufficient. Sorry about that; I was too quick to post a poorly formulated - and poorly designed - response.
Good collection of links! But many of these videos are outright scary. Note the windshield is covered in water - is there a wiper? Two crashes were shown; one is a minor bump of no consequence to any vehicle; another was a series of photos where the smaller vehicle was seriously damaged and overturned. Given tight quarters, the driver could be hurt even from that. Lack of crumple zones and small weight means that in a high speed collision the whole vehicle is accelerated to the speed of the other car in milliseconds, with enormous G forces. Most of the length of the car is occupied by your body, and your legs are only protected with a paper-thin decorative epoxy layer. A driver of a bus may not even notice your "car" down below, as he drives his huge vehicle all over you. A larger car would be better visible, and in case of a collision it would be only pushed aside - not driven over.
With regard to headlights, I cannot imagine having 2x100W headlights in such small vehicles - the battery alone would be prohibitive. What I saw in the video was more like 2x10W light bulbs, not really enough to see and be seen at night - except in a well-lit city.
With regard to age, that older guy is obviously in a better shape, physically, than I am. I know plenty of people with blood pressure problems and other ailments who are not advised to exert themselves. One needs to be healthy to do this thing; and you cannot take this vehicle for a casual 100 mile spin like I intend to do tomorrow, in a car, to visit a friend in another city.
Comments to some videos specifically mention that you get all sweaty even in cold weather. This is a dangerous combination!
Even for a very fit driver, 50 km/h seems to be a high speed,
This is one of my personal concerns about bicycle riders. They pedal so hard that they can't look around - they are too busy. On a motorbike it's not a problem, your body is free to lean and look back. This vehicle at least helps with that problem because it is inherently stable.
I'm not sure whether these would be allowed on the bike network in my city.
This vehicle is not very likely to fit into most bike lanes. And it is not suitable for bike paths that are not perfectly flat (with only 6" of clearance it got to be perfect.) I am not sure what major advantage would an avid bicycle rider have with this one if electric assist is not effective at speed. Most riders do OK at low speeds on their own.
You'd want to have somewhere to keep it locked up and safe, though.
You might just as well drop 8,000 euros on the ground and walk away :-) IMO, this ridiculous price is only to harvest the early crop of rich fools. Then the price is halved, and the new set of fools are harvested, and so on - until the price drops to some realistic number, like $300. That, IMO, would be a fair price for a crude bicycle under a cheap fiberglass shell, with a battery and a DC motor from a handheld vacuum cleaner of the variety that is sold for $25 in drug stores.
This vehicle combines the worst parts of bicycle experience with the worst parts of car experience. It only can be used to deliver your body from point A to point B - even though many, if not most, trips require carrying cargo (even as little as a laptop bag; but often groceries are also required.) This works only on absolutely flat land, and in good weather. In case of an accident your body will be neatly squashed by wheels of larger vehicles, making it a death trap. There are no creature comforts, such as a/c or radio or headlights, which makes it dangerous to drive at high temperatures (half of the year in half of the USA) or at night (other half of the year in another half of the USA.) Usability-wise, it's another Ginger (Segway,) only even less practical. Only well trained young men can ride the thing. Children cannot use it; older persons cannot use it; women, being statistically weaker, cannot use them. Even tired people, after a full day of honest work, may not need another exercise on their way home. Riders will arrive to their destinations soaked in sweat, stinking, dusty; their arms and legs will be shaking from exertion, and it will take some time for them to cool down and be ready to work at the office. All in all, this is yet another fringe vehicle for the same, well known fringe group that insists that public roads are their personal gym.
Bitcoin's days are numbered.
It may be not as simple to stomp the BC out. But ultimately yes, BC exists only at the pleasure of authorities. It is also a useful testbed for the government's control over such things. A BC activist on the Internet is just like an anti-government activist on the Internet. So if you learn now to identify the former you will be well prepared to deal with the latter. As all the world's societies slowly collapse onto themselves, like a star, the need for such means of control become more and more necessary (at least from the point of view of governments.) In essence, the future looks pretty dark; you can choose between the infinitely free world of Mad Max, if you are lucky, and the fascist society like 1984. All the countries in the world exhibit this trend because they are not politically willing to accept the natural solution - which is invariably bloody.
You could have millions of USD in Bitcoins but as long as you refuse to hand over your wallet, they will never know or be able to prove this.
Your [way of thinking is ] wrong. If I were the government I'd do this.
Phase 0. All financial accounts have to be registered with the government. This is already done for you by the banks. Now the government simply extends this requirement to Bitcoin.
Phase 1. Some Bitcoin holders register - and they are safe for now. You do not register. Read on.
Phase 2. The government starts monitoring Bitcoin transactions *and* the Internet. It becomes trivial to note that your IP generated some transaction and it got registered in the network. If you dare to walk to a store and buy something there with BC, all merchants will of course report your account and the sirens start blaring. You only can use your unregistered account from home or from public places that allow BC traffic (good luck finding those, with a prison term for the owner.) Perhaps a VPN to a foreign server is an option if you keep your wallet there; but those servers will be treated like foreign banks, and they will be requested to open the kimono for the IRS; otherwise they will be utterly destroyed. Even the Swiss government couldn't stand up to the USA; a group of teens in New Zealand have no chance.
Phase 3. The government accuses you of tax evasion. Your computer is seized and the wallet discovered. If you remain silent then the government's assertion that you transferred $big_bucks to another account stands unopposed, and you go to prison. If you do not remain silent and reveal the wallet's password then the government has you for whatever you did; you may be even released if there is no crime - but your fate will be a lesson to other Bitcoin revolutionaries.
Note that Phases 0 and 1 are *already* in effect. If you fill your tax forms yourself you probably saw a requirement there to report all foreign financial accounts that you control. This requirement is there for many years now, to fight the massive tax evasion by holders of accounts in Swiss banks. BC will be one such financial account, for sure (because it is - your money is held on the Internet, outside of the country.) Failure to disclose will result in an audit by a group of armed IRS agents. This is something that a prepared man can survive; but the vast majority of BC refuseniks will not be prepared men - and they will go down, fast and hard.
Cash? It's not exactly new.
Try to buy a house with cash; or land; or a company; or a ship. Try even to place an order for industrial parts and pay with cash. Many businesses are not set up to deal with cash.
Cash is only accepted for small transactions, those that do not matter in the big picture. That's why money laundering is a big business; it wouldn't be so if anyone could drive a trailer full of money bags to a bank and say that you want to make a deposit.
Even using cash for everyday purchases is getting more and more difficult. Give someone a $100 bill and be looked at with suspicion, and the bill - tested. Give someone a $1000 bill and you will likely be arrested until the police finds out that those bills do, in fact, exist. Want to buy gas? There is no attendant on duty, and the pumps only accept plastic. Want to use a parking facility? Go find the only exit that has a human cashier; all other exits are automated.
There is a very good reason for all that. The society benefits from automation of money-counting. It takes a human clerk to count your money - and there will be occasional mistakes. But when the cash register sends a transaction for $14.99 then the money charged will be exactly that - not more, not less. People also benefit from having safe access to all or most of their finances without the need to carry the cash in their pockets. Electronic money is also safe from counterfeiting; it never falls through the hole in your pocket; you will not be shortchanged, and you will not leave the coins as a tip.
But, of course, plastic is only your fair weather friend. Come TEOTWAWKI, and all your money has to be in your personal posession. Chances are, though, that after a SHTF event the old paper bills will not be very valuable - there are just too many of them, and they can be counterfeited or stolen en masse from banks' vaults, and in SHTF conditions it will be nearly impossible to understand what the value of money is. Essentially, if you give someone food for a $100 bill you'd better be sure someone else will give you 10 rounds of ammo for the same piece of paper. With the government out of the picture, nobody can be forced to accept that money; they need to be given good reasons to do so. One condition is that the printing presses (wherever they remain in operation) must not print more paper. But after TEOTWAWKI everyone who has access to these presses will do exactly that.
it is critically important that their trade order makes it over the wire in 0.001 seconds, rather than 0.006 seconds
If a lot worth of $100M falls down to $50M within a minute, each additional millisecond costs you about a thousand dollars. As more and more trading is done directly by computers that are loosely guided by traders, the prices can swing up or down as fast as those computers can generate trades. The firm with the fastest computer will have an advantage. If several computers are participating in that $100M to $50M event and the price drops not in one minute but in 1 second then each millisecond will cost you $50K. A firm with a reasonably fast computer can just sit on the stock exchange all day and collect money from every move in prices before that move is even noticed by humans. Buy 1M shares for $100.0 each and sell them five seconds later for $100.001 ... you just earned $1,000 in five seconds by sitting next to your computer and doing nothing. Since computer can do this to all stocks that exhibit interesting trends, you can make money hand over fist. And they do.
Is Itanium powered by the souls of the innocent?
You cannot power anything with the souls of the innocent. There are too few of those to have commercial value.
Now, Microsoft could certainly change their business plan, at least for gadgets, but wouldn't they have had to start, oh, a decade ago?
Lost time is just one aspect of the problem. They have worse demons than that. For example:
Windows was always Microsoft's cash cow. Generations of employees came and went working on that cow. It is engrained into MS's thinking that Windows == MS and MS == Windows. But these days MS has to accept that they are quickly losing dominance. You know what my desktop will be in 10 years? It will be probably Android-based, with or without overlapping windows (as needed, depending on the size of the monitor.) What is there in Windows that Android does not deliver? But think now, can MS give up on the future of its primary product? What will shareholders say to that? This is exactly why Ballmer is locked into the old vicious cycle of crossing desktops and tablets and then wondering why nothing works. MS as a company cannot think outside of their Windows box. Apple could - and it won the world.
Microsoft is not staffed with geniuses. MS people are, by and large, regular coders. They just know *everything* about the environment they operate in. But geniuses they are not. Take their advantages away and they are just as helpless as a startup who hired 10,000 random coders off the street.
And once you get to that point, MS will not be any better than anyone else. Except that they are ten years behind and they have no clue. MS is a large, old company. It is not like Google where inventive behavior was (or is) promoted. MS earned its money not by being creative but by being prolific. Mountains of code were written to do mundane tasks (MS Exchange, AD, and every other aspect of the server.) It is not fun, and it is not interesting. But it was profitable because enterprise paid them for developing all these functions over the years. MS is like a tank. But it's heavy and needs a lot of fuel. The world is not experiencing its best days; sales of existing MS software are not expected to skyrocket. 3rd world would gladly pirate all that they can - because they can't afford to buy anyway. MS would have to be very inventive to find something new to sell; but MS does not invent - not now, not ever. They are just plain slow.
This cathedral of MS still stands. But we already can see that when MS is forced to invent they invent poorly. Nobody in his right mind would make Metro a mandatory function. I bet it wouldn't be too hard to launch Metro environment whenever it is needed, and one could be minimized, and one could have more than one Metro environment if only anyone wanted that. But no, they decided that their only way is the true way, and everything else is heresy that ought to be eradicated. They even removed the "Start" button. You know what? I had the Media Center icon there in my test setup of Win8, and I can't even count how many times I clicked on it wanting to bring up the Start menu. How hard would it be to keep a component that you already have and that works just fine? I'm not always an idiot; I simply don't even think when I want to access the power menu or the control panel or my pinned applications. Years of the "Start something!" training bore fruit.
When you combine all these factors you will see that MS's future lies in maintenance of legacy software, of which they churned up a lot. If a small office now needs a mail+groupware server, that'd be MS Exchange. MS will sell that. But many clients of that server will be iPhones, iPads, Androids, and everything in between. Desktops with Windows will remain in production because too much essential software is locked into Windows and cannot be moved anywhere. But in an average company you will have one such engineering desktop for three or five mobile terminals. A company that sells clothes wouldn't need even one Windows machine. If they need a database, they can rent one for cheap, and if they need a custom client, that is just as easy to develop for a tablet as it is for Windows. (WPF with dat
Never underestimate the power of *cheap*!
Android is as cheap as it ever going to be ($zero.) Is MS going to pay OEMs for using their Win8?
Windows RT is going to cost an estimated $85 per copy to your average OEM. A Windows 8 Professional license on x86 will be considerably more. [link]
I can buy a whole tablet now for $99 or even less, and - imagine that - the hardware is included in the price!
Google can release Android for free because it is not the product, it's the grease in the data mining machine that Google runs. The daily bread does not come from Android OEMs, it comes from billions of ad clicks and other services. But MS cannot do that, they are a software house and they can't give their software away. As result they will not be able to compete. I cannot imagine why they even entered this market - this is a race to the bottom, and the software is already comfortably sitting at that bottom.
If I were MS I would be porting MS own products to Android and iOS. That's where MS's wares are viable. MS Office for Android - the true office - would be a killer application. Days of Windows are numbered, and while Windows will bring many more millions of dollars in revenue, its end is visible. Tablets are running on free software already. What's the point of even going there?
Oh come on, what about plays for sure?
We were all victims of a small typo. The real name of the program all the time was "Pays For Sure."
and they cost a fraction of the apps for Android, iOS or WP7
That would be possible only if you compare apples to oranges. A modern street navigation application for Android is a tad more complex than a calculator for Windows Mobile. If you go for complex software for WM then they were just as expensive as anything else. I know because I still run Alk's CoPilot on one of Windows Mobile devices (Dell Axim XV50.)
ISVs have no interest to sponsor a particular OS. If they port their application to X, Y and Z, the price will be about the same on all of them. Most of the cost is not in tools or in registration with Apple and not in signing keys. Most of the cost is in labor.
In really high winds, the sails are there just to keep you pointed in the right direction
In really high winds, the sails are not even there.
As long as they have telephone and internet access thay can do their jobs by telecommuting.
There may be many reasons why that's not possible. Traders use very specialized systems (hardware and software) to do their job. Administrators have access to highly confidential information. Many IT people do not want to have it all available on the Internet, even though a well encrypted VPN may be safe enough. One concern is that they don't know who is on the other side of that VPN (who has physical access to your work computer and your work papers.) When traders work in their offices they have security that the company provides (I can't waltz into a major trading firm and look over the shoulder of a senior trader.)
There is also such thing as latency... would your firm accept a loss of $100M just because your DSL was down for a few minutes (a wet cable can do that) and you couldn't sell when the customer is screaming "Sell! Sell! Now!" into your ear. And yes, the issue of communication is also there - traders need to be highly accessible to their bosses and to their customers. A cell phone in a SHTF condition is hardly good enough.
A good telecommuting setup is complex and expensive. Often it involves dedicating a room and installing a company-provided computer there, monitors, telephones, and sometimes a dedicated Internet link. Businesses don't want to share their secrets with your kids and their buddies. A minimalist setup involves a company laptop and a VPN; but that only works in some cases. If you need a desktop with multiple monitors then the situation quickly gets expensive.