the idea is that you shouldn't be able to own, say, a factory single-handedly (because you can't use it alone), but a car is perfectly fine.
That is not quite correct. Socialism and Communism prohibit ownership of production facilities. So you could own a car in USSR but you couldn't use it as a taxicab. You could own a home but you couldn't repair TVs in it for a fee. You could own "personal property" but only as long as it doesn't make you money. That part - making money - was reserved to the state, and no peasant was allowed to make money on his own.
That is the reason why I ran away to Seattle to kill myself in front of the student loans office.
Most programming jobs don't require use of legs in any way at all. Degree is not important, skills are. If nobody hires you, open your own business, it's free and you can sell stuff right away. There are thousands of niches where no big company can survive but a single small company can thrive. Write a cheaper MS Exchange clone, for example, that runs on Linux, that would be worth something, don't you think?
Besides, of all nice places to kill oneself, why the dreary, watery Seattle?
racist conservatives were pissed that there was a black man in the white house
Well, that certainly explains why Cain is in the lead. He may or may not get the nomination in the end, but he is going strong at the moment. If someone doesn't know, Cain is black. Very black.
I would say that among conservatives Obamacare was Obama's greatest sin. Taxing people just because they are alive is unacceptable. If Obamacare is that great, why don't people join the program on their own?
Seriously, rocks and sticks? What, did they outlaw knives in Portland?
Rocks and sticks are better weapons in a melee than knives. A knife extends your arm by 2-3". A rock extends your arm by 30'.
You realize that you can carry guns there, right, even a concealed pistol?
a) Felons can't own firearms or ammo.
b) You are not allowed to use firearm in a crime. Attacking police with a rock will get you arrested and held overnight, then released. Attacking police with a gun will get you killed on the spot by every LEO that can draw a bead on you. The mortician would be lucky if the number of holes in your body will be under 100. Taking a firearm into a confrontational situation is a dangerous game.
the amount of ionizing radiation they are talking about being covered up " is extremely low, equivalent to the radiation a person would receive in a few minutes of flying"
You gladly put yourself into a hot tub that is heated by a 2 kW electric heater. However you will not be happy if someone takes a hot soldering iron that has only 40W of power and sticks it up your body where it doesn't belong.
Or, you are happy to go to a beach and spend a few hours there. But you won't like it if someone takes a large magnifying glass and focuses the Sun's image onto your skin.
This demonstrates that talks about "total power" or "total radiation" are misleading. It is essential to understand how this power is used.
I'll have to find some sources, but didn't they refuse to allow the TSA employees to wear radiation exposure badges or something like that?
If airport personnel starts wearing radiation exposure badges the number of travelers will drop down to 1% (if not 0.1%) of what it was before.
TSA wants to banish the thought that anything dangerous might be occurring in those booths. Because of that no outward signs of such danger will be ever allowed. TSA drones will be gladly sacrificed.
It could be indeed a very good discussion on how to get there. Unfortunately it can't be done on a 5-minute time scale that Slashdot comments afford. Besides, I have to go back to my WPF chores in a moment.
I hope that indeed governments at some point realize that The Ostrich Solution doesn't work. But, as you say, all the history of humankind argues against that. It's hard to repair a multi-billion civilization; it's much easier to carve out small "safe" enclaves, gated communities on steroids, on islands, with their own armies, and just keep living like that. This preserves the power over others, and every ruler just loves that. Everyone else will have to fend for themselves.
I don't really know what the solution might be, but I'm sure it is not easy.
Maybe everybody who is a citizen should be guaranteed a minimum standard of living (however we define this)
Guaranteed out of what pot of money? Right now the government has to heavily tax those who work to pay those who don't work, for one reason or another. Handouts can't stop (there is a talk about that right now in Congress) because that would result in massive riots.
But if handouts can't stop then why would any worker be concerned about working? He could just relax, let it go, and live on public assistance.
But then the government can step in and force all able-bodied people to work - and it would have to find work for them. That would be the Soviet model, where make-work was freely available to anyone who asked. In most cases the worker would be paid for simply showing up. In the end this society devolves, and the last days of USSR demonstrated how exactly that happens.
Your plan depends on several miracles that haven't been observed in human psyche so far (or at least in reasonable quantities and over a reasonable period of time.) The worst of those required miracles is the requirement that 7 billion of idle pairs of hands will focus on culture or science. Just think of that. All scenarios of the future demand rise of the new man; he doesn't need to be super smart, but he has to be super honest.
If we don't have that "new man" - and Soviet Union tried hard to breed one, and failed - then all that we get is a world-wide ghetto. Perhaps that wouldn't be a physical ghetto, with burned out houses and gunfire in the streets, but it will be pretty close to that. Robots won't be able to repair houses fast enough because bored yoots will be forming gangs and terrorizing everyone just for fun, just because they wouldn't be able to find any other purpose in their lives. Don't forget that violence and tribal instincts are indeed instincts - something that is coded in our genes. Ghettos of today are just poorer; but gangs are formed not because their members want to eat; quite the opposite - gang members are well fed and bored. They are also powered by another instinct - the instinct to dominate over others. Can you imagine a gang leader among Star Trek characters, outside of games inside the Holodeck? But there has to be one or one million; if not among the elite crew then among the population of planets. Taking that out of man will require genetic engineering that would far exceed the effort that led to Eugenics Wars and probably would break the spirit of humans.
I don't claim any discoveries here, of course. This is one of several scenarios that are shown in SciFi literature. The problem is not only that humans need to work in order to eat, they also need to work to remain sane. Today very few people on the planet don't need to work, and even they invent things for themselves to do. But in the future it would be harder to find something to do outside of culture - and even the culture will degrade because too much of it is based in labor. If you look into The City and the Stars you will see that in order to keep the inhabitants of Diaspar docile they were all altered, including the protagonist and the Jester. No normal human (as we know them today) can survive in a society where he has absolutely nothing productive to do.
The traditional answer to that is also simple. If there is a fully automated factory that produces food out of thin air then why would you charge money for the food?
This of course bypasses the question of the initial investment, but that can be sorted out with minimal cost of products that zeroes out once the investment is recouped.
But this, in turn, presupposes that the investors are willing to walk away from their factory that is now making them money. On the other hand, if the society doesn't have money to pay for the product then the price can't be very high either.
All in all, most scenarios for the future Utopia need a new man who is not selfish, mean, power-grabbing, wanting to own the world and like that. Because the today's man is all that, especially about taking over the world.
In my personal view we are already getting there. Massive unemployment and permanent lack of employability of a good part of population (felons, ghetto dwellers, older people, younger people, lower IQ people) leads to formation of a large class of permanently unemployed who are doomed to live on government handouts in ever-expanding slums. The scale of this will only increase because no mechanisms are in place to combat it. Nobody even talks about it, except on Slashdot and in SciFi. However this is the path of lowest energy, so it will be unavoidably taken. More and more people will be cast aside as useless. The current system physically doesn't have any use for them, and the minimum salary laws are making it even worse. These laws say that if you can't make your employer more than $20 (or something) per hour he must not hire you. So a one-legged man who is only capable of mowing one lawn per day can't be legally employed.
or to lift a 400 ton concrete block, you would fail
That's trivial. Dig a trench around the concrete block all the way to the bottom of it and fill it with mercury. The concrete block will float, just as you requested.
A much simpler explanation exists. 3rd graders can get easy money out of 1st graders. However 1st graders can't get money from anyone else, so the easiest way for them to get money is by studying.
but unless they're contractors don't carry tape measures
And unless they are contractors they don't need to measure anything. Do you recall an event in your life when you, completely out of the blue, needed to measure something like that? I can only think of the hardware store like Home Depot, but measuring tape is readily available there.
4 weeks later and entire tank of poisonous and flammable hydrocarbons could leak from a damaged car onto a garage floor or into a drain.
And most likely it would have all evaporated without any ill effects, other than the empty fuel tank. And if anyone with a nose would be walking by he'd notice the leak immediately.
The problem here is that the damage to the battery was internal, undetectable, and then unstoppable. (You can't put the Lithium fire out with water.) As Volt is built, the driver just has to hope that the battery is not damaged by the usual (or unusual) vibration that any car experiences. Not all roads are perfect. It would be sad if you hit a pothole under water one day, and a month later your house burns down.
Still, you are right that "we've just gotten used to their failure modes." We can learn to manage batteries too. But this warning bell is an important part of that learning experience. My feeling is that the batteries must be eventually redesigned with safety in mind, just like we don't drive Ford Pintos anymore.
Buy a Prius, then ask how much it's going to cost to replace those batteries in a few years. You'll probably pass out from the shock.
You must be a very impressionable fellow if a simple zero could send you into convulsions.
I own a Prius for more than a "few years" and the battery is just like new. It has a warranty for 10 years, IIRC. There are millions of Priuses on the road, including the Generation 1 from 2000, but, amazingly, there is no "battery panic" anywhere, except in minds of people with agenda. Those people don't own the car, but they are willing to debate it with people who do.
a controller box will cost you a minimum of $100 or so including labor
There are other headaches that a pure software guy is likely to not be aware of. For example, hardware requires shipping; sometimes that is expensive. Hardware wears out and breaks - and tell me about breakage of things that are designed to be handled all day long! Spills of coffee and other funny liquids, hits with massive objects, cords ripped out - he will see it all. Worst of all, he will replace all that stuff essentially for free. Maintenance on this level (below Dell and IBM:-) is not a profit center.
But as you say it's not rare when an otherwise dull business plan is saved by a smart piece of custom hardware that nobody has. Or perhaps not saved (just ask the CueCat about that.) You are right that often hardware is sold where, in truth, no hardware is needed. But it makes many people happy. The seller gets to eat that day, and the buyer knows that the entire set is supported, and if something fails it's not his problem but the manufacturer's. The manufacturer is also comfortable knowing that no weird, bottom rung hardware is plugged into his carefully tuned system.
With regard to DRM, though, it's a mixed bag. First of all, hardware dongles can be had for a few dollars if you want them. But more and more ISVs don't want them. Why? Because they are that very hardware that get lost, breaks, and requires physical handling. The cost of an incremental copy that was zero suddenly becomes $20 + shipping, and that's something that can be tolerated only if your software is sold for much more than that.
Today's computers are loaded with unique IDs. If you want you can get serials of a bunch of serialized parts (CPU, m/b, video card, HDDs) plus MAC address (forgeable but hardly anyone knows how to,) and all the other hardware information that is not unique within the make and model but is different across many customers. If you combine just a few of those identifiers you get an excellent dongle, and you don't need to pay even a cent for it. All you need to do is just a simple RSA code to encrypt and to check signatures, all neatly provided to you within Windows. Your biggest problem is not false positives, it's false negatives.
But, one says, how do I move the license from box to box? It's easier to do by individually licensing each box, or issuing a site license, or maintaining your own license server for floating licenses. Rare is the software that is so impossibly expensive that every single copy has to be counted. And if your s/w is truly that gem, get a dongle, hire a team for support, and still you will be rolling in dough. Everyone else should stop quaking in their boots. Besides, most of specialized software is never cracked; and software that is cracked is cracked regardless of how hard it was supposed to be:-)
Nobody so far pointed that out. I'm doing electronic R&D and manufacturing in small quantity, and I can tell you that while the R&D for your thingy is ridiculously simple (I can do it within a few days easily) you will lose your shirt on manufacturing it.
Another issue is flexibility. Unless your product is a control for a nuclear power station, which is designed once and then used for 25 years with no changes, you will experience different needs. With GUI changes are easy. With hardware they are between hard and impossible.
Customization is part of that problem. Some people are righties, other are lefties. You can remap controls only if your physical knobs are laid out symmetrically. Are they? What if they aren't, and can't be? Then you have a problem.
All in all, I think hardware controls are good only in a fixed, closed system. You still have limited flexibility because every knob can be mapped to do whatever, but if knob A only rotates 270 degrees but you need at least 3600 degrees (or continuous rotation, with an optical encoder) then you are out of luck.
I'm not exactly sure what do you mean by "wrong". The original question was: "Have you performed the equations to see if the energy required to run the A/C longer is offset by the lessened energy required to push the car through wind resistance?" - and that was related to the possibility that as your EV gets stuck in traffic (10 mph easily) it will (or won't) experience lower efficiency, possibly resulting in running out of power in the middle of a packed freeway.
The optimum speed depends on many factors, and the numbers that I found on Wikipedia and elsewhere are not necessarily representative of all cars in existence. Car manufacturers have access to the data, but they aren't publishing it for everyone to use. Tire manufacturers publish some data, but it varies from 0.05 to 0.15 for Crr - all depends on air pressure, on type of tire, on type of the road, and perhaps on other factors.
In any case, nobody argues that you should drive optimally. As I recall, the optimum speed for Prius is about 30-40 mph, that's what hypermilers use. But absolutely nobody sticks to these speeds "just because" - as you correctly point out, getting somewhere is also valuable, even if it costs you a dollar more:-)
The real issue that we were discussing is the loss of efficiency at low speeds. You can probably agree that even 20 mph is often the top speed you can hope for in a traffic jam. These jams happen regardless of your choice, and the car should be capable enough to carry you through it however long it may take - an hour, maybe two, maybe more in severe cases (like when there is a major accident on a bridge and there is no good detour.) In this aspect I wasn't wrong - you will lose your shirt if you sit in traffic in an EV that runs A/C, lights and otherwise consumes power, however little - you aren't moving, so this power draw can continue forever, and the battery will eventually give up.
I believe your statement to be incorrect and since you made it YOU get to prove it.
Well, here you are.
You are claiming that if the car moves slower it may become more efficient, A/C or other such loads notwithstanding, because (in part) the air resistance will be reduced.
My position is that this statement may be true only down to some speed, but pretty soon the air resistance will stop having a major effect on the power consumption, and other factors become prevailing.
I can be also shown that the "power required at 60 mph vs. A/C power" is not relevant because there is always a speed for which the A/C power exceeds the motive power.
The power needed to move the car is spent on:
Feeding static loads, such as the A/C, the lights, the heating system, the radio, accessories, whatever. For all intents and purposes it is fixed. Let's call it S.
Overcoming the rolling resistance. The power spent on that is: C_{rr} * N * v, where only 'v' is a variable (the speed.) So we have a linear dependency here. Fine.
We should be OK limiting ourselves to these major factors. Whatever remains is 2nd and 3rd order. To simplify these findings we can write this:
P = m*v^3 + k*v + S
The 'm' and 'k' are obvious coefficients derived from above formulas. This is quite a simple equation. Let's see how it behaves.
m would be Crr*N. For Crr=0.01 and N=10kN we get m=100. As a sanity check, pushing a car at 1 m/s would require 100 watts, and getting to 30 mph (13 m/s) would require 1300W. Sounds reasonable.
The 'k' would be harder to get to, in part because we don't know the figure for the effective surface of the car. Let's cheat a little and use this fact from Wikipedia:
"A car cruising on a highway at 50 mph (80 km/h) may require only 10 horsepower (7.5 kW) to overcome air drag, but that same car at 100 mph (160 km/h) requires 80 hp (60 kW)."
This gives us an easy value for 'k', and that would be 7500/(22.35^3) = 0.672. I don't know what 'car' they mean, but it will do.
Now the formula is complete. Let's examine it for S=1 kW:
P = 0.672*v^3 + 100*v + 1000 (in watts.)
Since we want to know the efficiency E (watts per unit of distance) we need to do a bit more. Let's assume that the speed is constant (to avoid integrals.) The travel time is D/v, where 'D' is some distance between city A and city B. The total consumed energy will be P(v)*(D/v), and E(v) would be then simply P(v)/v.
As I predicted, we are dividing by 'v', so we will be getting infinity near v=0. I bothered to put all this into MathCAD, and of course the graph shows exactly what I was telling you all along. The minimum power per unit of distance happens at about 10 m/s, and rises as you either reduce the speed or increase the speed.
I was told by the salesperson (Chicago store) that the battery would indeed be swappable for a higher-capacity battery in the future.
It's the salesman's job to tell the customer whatever the customer wants to hear - even if it is a blatant lie. Nobody in the industry would be insane enough to bet that product X or feature Y will be ever implemented and sold.
But in this case the salesman didn't need to lie. "The future" is a poorly defined moment in time, perhaps a few million years after we are all dead.
Have you performed the equations to see if the energy required to run the A/C longer is offset by the lessened energy required to push the car through wind resistance?
There is no need for formulas yet. A simple thought experiment is sufficient.
Imagine a car that runs at 1 micrometer per hour. The driver has to use A/C. Obviously the energy consumption per mile will be sky high (infinitely high if the speed is zero.) This proves that the problem is real at some speeds. Similarly we can conclude that if the car moves very fast (up to c if we want to) the consumption of energy will be growing infinitely, whereas the distance is the same... which also means increased power demand per mile. Therefore there is some optimum (one or several) and outside of those optimums you will have a problem.
As it applies to this scenario, it is easy to see that 5 mph traffic and full blast A/C will be hard on the battery. If it's night then A/C is probably not needed, but then you need 100-200W headlights and smaller taillights on to comply with the law. If it's winter then you need heating. All in all, easy access to vast amounts of energy is what makes a gasoline car so flexible. I own a Prius, and while its battery is a great help I'd hate to depend on just the battery for all power needs. It simply can't be charged as fast as a gas tank, and it can't take an infinite number of "refills" like a gas tank. This places the pure EV into a "specialty car" category, restricted to certain usage patterns.
Slashdot Mirror
Citation Needed
Let me Google this for you. This is from the very first returned result:
There are about 3 million more results, and it appears that this requirement is not unique.
the idea is that you shouldn't be able to own, say, a factory single-handedly (because you can't use it alone), but a car is perfectly fine.
That is not quite correct. Socialism and Communism prohibit ownership of production facilities. So you could own a car in USSR but you couldn't use it as a taxicab. You could own a home but you couldn't repair TVs in it for a fee. You could own "personal property" but only as long as it doesn't make you money. That part - making money - was reserved to the state, and no peasant was allowed to make money on his own.
That is the reason why I ran away to Seattle to kill myself in front of the student loans office.
Most programming jobs don't require use of legs in any way at all. Degree is not important, skills are. If nobody hires you, open your own business, it's free and you can sell stuff right away. There are thousands of niches where no big company can survive but a single small company can thrive. Write a cheaper MS Exchange clone, for example, that runs on Linux, that would be worth something, don't you think?
Besides, of all nice places to kill oneself, why the dreary, watery Seattle?
racist conservatives were pissed that there was a black man in the white house
Well, that certainly explains why Cain is in the lead. He may or may not get the nomination in the end, but he is going strong at the moment. If someone doesn't know, Cain is black. Very black.
I would say that among conservatives Obamacare was Obama's greatest sin. Taxing people just because they are alive is unacceptable. If Obamacare is that great, why don't people join the program on their own?
Seriously, rocks and sticks? What, did they outlaw knives in Portland?
Rocks and sticks are better weapons in a melee than knives. A knife extends your arm by 2-3". A rock extends your arm by 30'.
You realize that you can carry guns there, right, even a concealed pistol?
a) Felons can't own firearms or ammo.
b) You are not allowed to use firearm in a crime. Attacking police with a rock will get you arrested and held overnight, then released. Attacking police with a gun will get you killed on the spot by every LEO that can draw a bead on you. The mortician would be lucky if the number of holes in your body will be under 100. Taking a firearm into a confrontational situation is a dangerous game.
Hippies are not the only demographic represented in the OWS protests, and not even the largest.
But they might be the most lovable part of the OWS movement, compared to others.
the amount of ionizing radiation they are talking about being covered up " is extremely low, equivalent to the radiation a person would receive in a few minutes of flying"
You gladly put yourself into a hot tub that is heated by a 2 kW electric heater. However you will not be happy if someone takes a hot soldering iron that has only 40W of power and sticks it up your body where it doesn't belong.
Or, you are happy to go to a beach and spend a few hours there. But you won't like it if someone takes a large magnifying glass and focuses the Sun's image onto your skin.
This demonstrates that talks about "total power" or "total radiation" are misleading. It is essential to understand how this power is used.
I'll have to find some sources, but didn't they refuse to allow the TSA employees to wear radiation exposure badges or something like that?
If airport personnel starts wearing radiation exposure badges the number of travelers will drop down to 1% (if not 0.1%) of what it was before.
TSA wants to banish the thought that anything dangerous might be occurring in those booths. Because of that no outward signs of such danger will be ever allowed. TSA drones will be gladly sacrificed.
You literally build your game board with LEGOs and then play a game with LEGO characters and LEGO dice.
You can build a bordello out of bricks. This doesn't mean that you can buy bricks only at a sex shop.
It could be indeed a very good discussion on how to get there. Unfortunately it can't be done on a 5-minute time scale that Slashdot comments afford. Besides, I have to go back to my WPF chores in a moment.
I hope that indeed governments at some point realize that The Ostrich Solution doesn't work. But, as you say, all the history of humankind argues against that. It's hard to repair a multi-billion civilization; it's much easier to carve out small "safe" enclaves, gated communities on steroids, on islands, with their own armies, and just keep living like that. This preserves the power over others, and every ruler just loves that. Everyone else will have to fend for themselves.
I don't really know what the solution might be, but I'm sure it is not easy.
Maybe everybody who is a citizen should be guaranteed a minimum standard of living (however we define this)
Guaranteed out of what pot of money? Right now the government has to heavily tax those who work to pay those who don't work, for one reason or another. Handouts can't stop (there is a talk about that right now in Congress) because that would result in massive riots.
But if handouts can't stop then why would any worker be concerned about working? He could just relax, let it go, and live on public assistance.
But then the government can step in and force all able-bodied people to work - and it would have to find work for them. That would be the Soviet model, where make-work was freely available to anyone who asked. In most cases the worker would be paid for simply showing up. In the end this society devolves, and the last days of USSR demonstrated how exactly that happens.
Your plan depends on several miracles that haven't been observed in human psyche so far (or at least in reasonable quantities and over a reasonable period of time.) The worst of those required miracles is the requirement that 7 billion of idle pairs of hands will focus on culture or science. Just think of that. All scenarios of the future demand rise of the new man; he doesn't need to be super smart, but he has to be super honest.
If we don't have that "new man" - and Soviet Union tried hard to breed one, and failed - then all that we get is a world-wide ghetto. Perhaps that wouldn't be a physical ghetto, with burned out houses and gunfire in the streets, but it will be pretty close to that. Robots won't be able to repair houses fast enough because bored yoots will be forming gangs and terrorizing everyone just for fun, just because they wouldn't be able to find any other purpose in their lives. Don't forget that violence and tribal instincts are indeed instincts - something that is coded in our genes. Ghettos of today are just poorer; but gangs are formed not because their members want to eat; quite the opposite - gang members are well fed and bored. They are also powered by another instinct - the instinct to dominate over others. Can you imagine a gang leader among Star Trek characters, outside of games inside the Holodeck? But there has to be one or one million; if not among the elite crew then among the population of planets. Taking that out of man will require genetic engineering that would far exceed the effort that led to Eugenics Wars and probably would break the spirit of humans.
I don't claim any discoveries here, of course. This is one of several scenarios that are shown in SciFi literature. The problem is not only that humans need to work in order to eat, they also need to work to remain sane. Today very few people on the planet don't need to work, and even they invent things for themselves to do. But in the future it would be harder to find something to do outside of culture - and even the culture will degrade because too much of it is based in labor. If you look into The City and the Stars you will see that in order to keep the inhabitants of Diaspar docile they were all altered, including the protagonist and the Jester. No normal human (as we know them today) can survive in a society where he has absolutely nothing productive to do.
Technically, any sturdy box will do.
The problem is that no one will hire me to "think brilliant thoughts" for them. So how do I get paid for thinking brilliant thoughts?
You open your own company, of course.
You could have arrived at this brilliant thought yourself. Why haven't you? Perhaps your luminance meter requires calibration?
Where then will everybody work?
The traditional answer to that is also simple. If there is a fully automated factory that produces food out of thin air then why would you charge money for the food?
This of course bypasses the question of the initial investment, but that can be sorted out with minimal cost of products that zeroes out once the investment is recouped.
But this, in turn, presupposes that the investors are willing to walk away from their factory that is now making them money. On the other hand, if the society doesn't have money to pay for the product then the price can't be very high either.
All in all, most scenarios for the future Utopia need a new man who is not selfish, mean, power-grabbing, wanting to own the world and like that. Because the today's man is all that, especially about taking over the world.
In my personal view we are already getting there. Massive unemployment and permanent lack of employability of a good part of population (felons, ghetto dwellers, older people, younger people, lower IQ people) leads to formation of a large class of permanently unemployed who are doomed to live on government handouts in ever-expanding slums. The scale of this will only increase because no mechanisms are in place to combat it. Nobody even talks about it, except on Slashdot and in SciFi. However this is the path of lowest energy, so it will be unavoidably taken. More and more people will be cast aside as useless. The current system physically doesn't have any use for them, and the minimum salary laws are making it even worse. These laws say that if you can't make your employer more than $20 (or something) per hour he must not hire you. So a one-legged man who is only capable of mowing one lawn per day can't be legally employed.
or to lift a 400 ton concrete block, you would fail
That's trivial. Dig a trench around the concrete block all the way to the bottom of it and fill it with mercury. The concrete block will float, just as you requested.
A much simpler explanation exists. 3rd graders can get easy money out of 1st graders. However 1st graders can't get money from anyone else, so the easiest way for them to get money is by studying.
but unless they're contractors don't carry tape measures
And unless they are contractors they don't need to measure anything. Do you recall an event in your life when you, completely out of the blue, needed to measure something like that? I can only think of the hardware store like Home Depot, but measuring tape is readily available there.
4 weeks later and entire tank of poisonous and flammable hydrocarbons could leak from a damaged car onto a garage floor or into a drain.
And most likely it would have all evaporated without any ill effects, other than the empty fuel tank. And if anyone with a nose would be walking by he'd notice the leak immediately.
The problem here is that the damage to the battery was internal, undetectable, and then unstoppable. (You can't put the Lithium fire out with water.) As Volt is built, the driver just has to hope that the battery is not damaged by the usual (or unusual) vibration that any car experiences. Not all roads are perfect. It would be sad if you hit a pothole under water one day, and a month later your house burns down.
Still, you are right that "we've just gotten used to their failure modes." We can learn to manage batteries too. But this warning bell is an important part of that learning experience. My feeling is that the batteries must be eventually redesigned with safety in mind, just like we don't drive Ford Pintos anymore.
Buy a Prius, then ask how much it's going to cost to replace those batteries in a few years. You'll probably pass out from the shock.
You must be a very impressionable fellow if a simple zero could send you into convulsions.
I own a Prius for more than a "few years" and the battery is just like new. It has a warranty for 10 years, IIRC. There are millions of Priuses on the road, including the Generation 1 from 2000, but, amazingly, there is no "battery panic" anywhere, except in minds of people with agenda. Those people don't own the car, but they are willing to debate it with people who do.
a controller box will cost you a minimum of $100 or so including labor
There are other headaches that a pure software guy is likely to not be aware of. For example, hardware requires shipping; sometimes that is expensive. Hardware wears out and breaks - and tell me about breakage of things that are designed to be handled all day long! Spills of coffee and other funny liquids, hits with massive objects, cords ripped out - he will see it all. Worst of all, he will replace all that stuff essentially for free. Maintenance on this level (below Dell and IBM :-) is not a profit center.
But as you say it's not rare when an otherwise dull business plan is saved by a smart piece of custom hardware that nobody has. Or perhaps not saved (just ask the CueCat about that.) You are right that often hardware is sold where, in truth, no hardware is needed. But it makes many people happy. The seller gets to eat that day, and the buyer knows that the entire set is supported, and if something fails it's not his problem but the manufacturer's. The manufacturer is also comfortable knowing that no weird, bottom rung hardware is plugged into his carefully tuned system.
With regard to DRM, though, it's a mixed bag. First of all, hardware dongles can be had for a few dollars if you want them. But more and more ISVs don't want them. Why? Because they are that very hardware that get lost, breaks, and requires physical handling. The cost of an incremental copy that was zero suddenly becomes $20 + shipping, and that's something that can be tolerated only if your software is sold for much more than that.
Today's computers are loaded with unique IDs. If you want you can get serials of a bunch of serialized parts (CPU, m/b, video card, HDDs) plus MAC address (forgeable but hardly anyone knows how to,) and all the other hardware information that is not unique within the make and model but is different across many customers. If you combine just a few of those identifiers you get an excellent dongle, and you don't need to pay even a cent for it. All you need to do is just a simple RSA code to encrypt and to check signatures, all neatly provided to you within Windows. Your biggest problem is not false positives, it's false negatives.
But, one says, how do I move the license from box to box? It's easier to do by individually licensing each box, or issuing a site license, or maintaining your own license server for floating licenses. Rare is the software that is so impossibly expensive that every single copy has to be counted. And if your s/w is truly that gem, get a dongle, hire a team for support, and still you will be rolling in dough. Everyone else should stop quaking in their boots. Besides, most of specialized software is never cracked; and software that is cracked is cracked regardless of how hard it was supposed to be :-)
Nobody so far pointed that out. I'm doing electronic R&D and manufacturing in small quantity, and I can tell you that while the R&D for your thingy is ridiculously simple (I can do it within a few days easily) you will lose your shirt on manufacturing it.
Another issue is flexibility. Unless your product is a control for a nuclear power station, which is designed once and then used for 25 years with no changes, you will experience different needs. With GUI changes are easy. With hardware they are between hard and impossible.
Customization is part of that problem. Some people are righties, other are lefties. You can remap controls only if your physical knobs are laid out symmetrically. Are they? What if they aren't, and can't be? Then you have a problem.
All in all, I think hardware controls are good only in a fixed, closed system. You still have limited flexibility because every knob can be mapped to do whatever, but if knob A only rotates 270 degrees but you need at least 3600 degrees (or continuous rotation, with an optical encoder) then you are out of luck.
I'm not exactly sure what do you mean by "wrong". The original question was: "Have you performed the equations to see if the energy required to run the A/C longer is offset by the lessened energy required to push the car through wind resistance?" - and that was related to the possibility that as your EV gets stuck in traffic (10 mph easily) it will (or won't) experience lower efficiency, possibly resulting in running out of power in the middle of a packed freeway.
The optimum speed depends on many factors, and the numbers that I found on Wikipedia and elsewhere are not necessarily representative of all cars in existence. Car manufacturers have access to the data, but they aren't publishing it for everyone to use. Tire manufacturers publish some data, but it varies from 0.05 to 0.15 for Crr - all depends on air pressure, on type of tire, on type of the road, and perhaps on other factors.
In any case, nobody argues that you should drive optimally. As I recall, the optimum speed for Prius is about 30-40 mph, that's what hypermilers use. But absolutely nobody sticks to these speeds "just because" - as you correctly point out, getting somewhere is also valuable, even if it costs you a dollar more :-)
The real issue that we were discussing is the loss of efficiency at low speeds. You can probably agree that even 20 mph is often the top speed you can hope for in a traffic jam. These jams happen regardless of your choice, and the car should be capable enough to carry you through it however long it may take - an hour, maybe two, maybe more in severe cases (like when there is a major accident on a bridge and there is no good detour.) In this aspect I wasn't wrong - you will lose your shirt if you sit in traffic in an EV that runs A/C, lights and otherwise consumes power, however little - you aren't moving, so this power draw can continue forever, and the battery will eventually give up.
I believe your statement to be incorrect and since you made it YOU get to prove it.
Well, here you are.
You are claiming that if the car moves slower it may become more efficient, A/C or other such loads notwithstanding, because (in part) the air resistance will be reduced.
My position is that this statement may be true only down to some speed, but pretty soon the air resistance will stop having a major effect on the power consumption, and other factors become prevailing.
I can be also shown that the "power required at 60 mph vs. A/C power" is not relevant because there is always a speed for which the A/C power exceeds the motive power.
The power needed to move the car is spent on:
We should be OK limiting ourselves to these major factors. Whatever remains is 2nd and 3rd order. To simplify these findings we can write this:
P = m*v^3 + k*v + S
The 'm' and 'k' are obvious coefficients derived from above formulas. This is quite a simple equation. Let's see how it behaves.
m would be Crr*N. For Crr=0.01 and N=10kN we get m=100. As a sanity check, pushing a car at 1 m/s would require 100 watts, and getting to 30 mph (13 m/s) would require 1300W. Sounds reasonable.
The 'k' would be harder to get to, in part because we don't know the figure for the effective surface of the car. Let's cheat a little and use this fact from Wikipedia:
"A car cruising on a highway at 50 mph (80 km/h) may require only 10 horsepower (7.5 kW) to overcome air drag, but that same car at 100 mph (160 km/h) requires 80 hp (60 kW)."
This gives us an easy value for 'k', and that would be 7500/(22.35^3) = 0.672. I don't know what 'car' they mean, but it will do.
Now the formula is complete. Let's examine it for S=1 kW:
P = 0.672*v^3 + 100*v + 1000 (in watts.)
Since we want to know the efficiency E (watts per unit of distance) we need to do a bit more. Let's assume that the speed is constant (to avoid integrals.) The travel time is D/v, where 'D' is some distance between city A and city B. The total consumed energy will be P(v)*(D/v), and E(v) would be then simply P(v)/v.
As I predicted, we are dividing by 'v', so we will be getting infinity near v=0. I bothered to put all this into MathCAD, and of course the graph shows exactly what I was telling you all along. The minimum power per unit of distance happens at about 10 m/s, and rises as you either reduce the speed or increase the speed.
Q.E.D.
I was told by the salesperson (Chicago store) that the battery would indeed be swappable for a higher-capacity battery in the future.
It's the salesman's job to tell the customer whatever the customer wants to hear - even if it is a blatant lie. Nobody in the industry would be insane enough to bet that product X or feature Y will be ever implemented and sold.
But in this case the salesman didn't need to lie. "The future" is a poorly defined moment in time, perhaps a few million years after we are all dead.
Have you performed the equations to see if the energy required to run the A/C longer is offset by the lessened energy required to push the car through wind resistance?
There is no need for formulas yet. A simple thought experiment is sufficient.
Imagine a car that runs at 1 micrometer per hour. The driver has to use A/C. Obviously the energy consumption per mile will be sky high (infinitely high if the speed is zero.) This proves that the problem is real at some speeds. Similarly we can conclude that if the car moves very fast (up to c if we want to) the consumption of energy will be growing infinitely, whereas the distance is the same... which also means increased power demand per mile. Therefore there is some optimum (one or several) and outside of those optimums you will have a problem.
As it applies to this scenario, it is easy to see that 5 mph traffic and full blast A/C will be hard on the battery. If it's night then A/C is probably not needed, but then you need 100-200W headlights and smaller taillights on to comply with the law. If it's winter then you need heating. All in all, easy access to vast amounts of energy is what makes a gasoline car so flexible. I own a Prius, and while its battery is a great help I'd hate to depend on just the battery for all power needs. It simply can't be charged as fast as a gas tank, and it can't take an infinite number of "refills" like a gas tank. This places the pure EV into a "specialty car" category, restricted to certain usage patterns.