The 15x improvement in density is clear from the summary. However, the current assumption is that automakers will use that higher density to increase distance to something reasonable rather than to decrease the weight of the battery for easier transport. The Chevy Volt battery weighs 400 pounds and provides between 1/6th and 1/12th the range of an average gasoline-powered car. So to achieve range parity, you're still going to need close to a 400 pound battery even with this new battery technology. For an SUV or mini-SUV, the battery might even be over 400 pounds.
As for your other point, you could use multiple packs, of course, but when you do that, each pack needs power connectors, handles, and some sort of solid wall to protect the cell from impact. That costs you a lot of volumetric energy density, and to some extent, weight density. Also, you now need a separate charge controller per pack where otherwise you might have been able to get away with fewer, and that probably translates to more wires as well, which translates to more weight. When you're dealing with high-current DC systems, the weight of wiring can be significant. So there's a non-negligible materials cost and materials weight associated with such a design.
Here's a second reality check: we still have dozens of different sizes and shapes of 12-volt starter batteries some 40 years after the industry switched over from 6-volt batteries. I'd rate the odds of automakers standardizing on a single-digit number of standardized giant lithium-ion packs (and losing much of their competitive advantage in the process) somewhere around the same as the odds of a ball of frozen ice crystals remaining intact inside Satan's lair.
In the past the average person knew little about the outside world in the way we do now.
In the way we do now, yes, but even now, does the average person know and care to the same degree? Therein lies the critical question, for in apathy lies the greatest threat to liberty.
The difference is that in the past, such abuses were largely unsuccessful. These days, not so much. The Opium wars didn't result in random drug testing that prevents people from getting jobs because of smoking weed in their free time. It didn't create subcultures of people arrested for sale of drugs who are permanently blackballed from holding jobs in polite society. And so on. We really do have a different set of problems this time.
And book burnings were historically common in the distant past, but most folks thought we were past that point in our cultural development. Then 9/11 happened, and suddenly there are Qur'ans ablaze.
And nobody in history has perfected manipulation of history the way governments have in the last part of the 20th and the first part of the 21st century. The news is filtered by governments to the point that dissenting voices are only allowed to continue as long as they are seen as highly biased partisans. If you get a dissenting voice that isn't obviously strongly biased, but rather evaluates things rationally, it is usually crushed quickly. It's sad that the sole remaining voices of reason and common sense in the news business are relegated to a comedy network.
Technology has significantly altered the balance of power in favor of those who wish to control others. Although it is possible for the public to use technology (encryption, for example) to protect themselves, the majority of people are not savvy enough to do so. It takes the collective effort and understanding of everyone (or nearly everyone) working together to increase freedom and reduce government abuse, whereas it takes only one or two tech-savvy government officials to push the pendulum the other way.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the sky is falling right now, but I've seen the U.S. government do an awful lot of stuff in the past thirteen years that in the prior couple of decades I would never have imagined our country could sink to. In a lot of ways, it is like we're going through McCarthyism all over again, and for those of us born after that crap ended, it comes as something of a shock. Eventually, these bad seeds will likely be uprooted from our government, but each time, it seems like it takes longer to rein in the government abuse. Unless that trend changes, there will eventually come a time when it is no longer possible to rein them in at all. The worst part is that most people won't know it is coming until the sky has fallen, and no one can hear you scream.
Amazon gets this wrong all the time. For example, every time I buy a hard drive, it gives ads for hard drives until I delete them all from my browsing history. I mean yeah, I'll buy more than one hard drive in a lifetime, but I probably won't buy one for at least a year or two. The same goes for pretty much any product except books and movies. You might buy spare blades for that razor or spare cutting discs for that Dremel, but you're unlikely to buy a second razor or a second Dremel, even if it is a different model of razor or Dremel. Oh, and if you bought spare blades for the razor when you bought the razor, you're not going to need spare blades for a while, either, and even when you do, you're not going to need incompatible blades for a different kind of razor. (Okay, so I think all razor blades for razor knives are universal these days, but you get my point.)
HTML/CSS is meant to separate content from presentation, so why don't they do it by default?
Because automatic hyphenation was added a couple of years ago and CSS has been around since 1996. Changing to use automatic hyphenation by default would thus break existing content. By convention, new features in CSS must be opt-in, not opt-out.
Instead of charging the battery in the car, exchange the empty battery for a loaded one.
Know an easy and inexpensive way to quickly lift and replace (with reasonable positional accuracy) a battery that weighs 400 pounds? (And that's just the small one in a Chevy Volt.) You'd need a forklift.
If you're ignoring those you're essentially ignoring TeX saying "I can't figure out how to not make this look like crap" and then complaining that the results look like crap. Sometimes, rarely, human intervention is needed.
Sadly, even such simple things as em dashes in UTF-8 confuse XeLaTeX as shipped, resulting in overfull hbox errors. (Hint: it is always legal to wrap after one.) And if you don't use UTF-8 characters, it also confuses LaTeX by default, but in different ways. (Hint: it is never legal to wrap before an em dash.)
I resorted to starting from XML and programmatically adding wrap hints (zero-length hspace) in the right places to make LaTeX behave. By contrast, every word processor written or released in the past five years gets this right, every text editor, and every web browser. Thus, there's at least one case where LaTeX can require a lot more work to get something that looks good than a word processor does.
XeLaTeX adds super-advanced extra typography. Are you claiming that many house styles would require XeTeX to match their default Word templates?
The main benefit of XeLaTeX is that it supports modern fonts without the need to manually create metafont files for them. That and support for UTF-8. Although you can probably work around both features if you had to, XeTeX does make life a lot more bearable if you're using custom in-house fonts.
If you want to know the details, the moderator asked him why people were pessimistic about technology, and whether science fiction authors had any role to play in shaping this viewpoint. Naturally, he said that science fiction (as a whole) could write optimistic futures to help inspire scientists and engineers.
Which is interesting, but wrong, because it incorrectly assumes that the pessimism is misplaced, that the fault therefore lies with the public, and that the science fiction affected the public as a whole. In reality, people are pessimistic about technology in large part because it is so frequently misused and abused, which is largely because the @$^@#$& science fiction writers keep giving world governments ideas. 1984? TVs with webcams. Fahrenheit 451? Book burnings. Brave New World? Witness a public education system that no longer teaches us to question, a drug war resulting in huge subcultures that are shunned from society as a whole, or the mass high fructose corn syrup addiction that addles much of the public. The governments don't read these books and think, "It would suck if society were ruled in a draconian manner," but rather, "Society is going to be ruled in a draconian manner eventually, so I'd better take steps to secure my place at the helm." And this is why science fiction causes the public to become pessimistic about technology.
Before you answer, keep in mind that LaTeX can't comply with many house styles without going as far as something like XeLaTeX, on typeface grounds alone.
There are some things that LaTeX can't do even with XeLaTeX that are trivial in even a basic HTML renderer—adding the CSS min-width attribute to a box, for example—you can approximate it by precomputing the typeset length of the string, but it's still an approximation, and takes a screenful of LaTeX code just to define the command.
With the addition of a handful of typographical features such as continuation lines (the "Blah blah (cont'd)" bit at the top of a page when something with a heading is split across a page break), modern HTML and CSS could do pretty much anything LaTeX can do, but far more cleanly, with proper separation of presentation from content and a much better programming model (none of this macro mess).
My point is that it isn't a requirement for the boxes to have that data, and there's no valid reason for the boxes to have or store that data because it does not provide information that is useful forensically, therefore they are unlikely to have that data. Any manufacturer choosing to add such logging on its own, once caught, would get a major black mark in the press, which means no manufacturer would willingly add it unless forced to do so by law. And because the only possible purpose of having GPS in the black box would be to enable the sorts of fishing expeditions you describe, any law requiring the devices to have GPS logging would get the person who suggested it seriously raked over the coals.
In addition to mandatory smog inspections, what is to prevent some governments from mandating recorder dumps yearly, followed by citations in the mail?
Lack of location information. That vehicle could have been on an autobahn at the time, for all the government knows. And if they already have cameras sufficient to prove that you were in the state at the time, they also have cameras sufficient to prove you were speeding without the need for the black box.
And there are an infinite number of reasons why LaTeX is better than both.
Until you find yourself writing your own document classes or other custom macro sets. Then, there are an infinite number of reasons why just about anything is better than LaTeX.
On the other hand, all of the patent troll lawsuits that have ever been filed were filed only because someone called their bluff. The reason people settle is that A. some of the patent trolls are too clueless to know that they are bluffing, and B.when they file suit anyway, the cost of defending the lawsuit could easily exceed the requested settlement.
A better way to prevent patent trolls is to develop a reputation for stomping them into the ground with countersuits (ideally, before they even have the chance to file their lawsuit). Even if they have never produced a product, you can still pull together undeclared prior art and sue to have pretty much their entire patent portfolio overturned. Do that a couple of times and the trolls will think twice about talking to you unless they have successfully sued a fair number of other companies first.:-)
First, I'm not giving any advice here. Second, I'm failing to see how the legal code you're linking to disagrees with my comment that federal law does not absolutely prevent a felon from owning a gun. As far as I can tell, there are two situations in which this can legally occur:
A felon can purchase a firearm and later become a non-violent felon. Such a person does not, to my knowledge, magically lose that firearm (except perhaps in California).
A felon living in a state that does not have laws specifically banning private sale of firearms to felons can legally purchase them from individuals residing in that state, provided that the sellers are not licensed dealers or collectors.
Unless I'm missing something significant, the federal laws you cite above only cover two types of sale: interstate/international sales and sales by licensed dealers/collectors. Am I missing something?
Technically it isn't illegal for a felon to own a gun, only for a licensed dealer to sell a gun to a felon. Private sales between individuals are not impeded. I'm not saying it isn't potentially a punishment, but it isn't nearly as clear cut.
Also, United States v. Comstock didn't cover the ex post facto question. It covered only whether it was within the authority of the Federal Government to pass such a law. The question of whether it violated the right to not have additional punishments imposed by a law passed after sentencing was not the issue before the court. Because the government has always had the right to force the institutionalization of the insane, this was a ridiculous approach for trying to overturn the law.
The correct argument was not that the institutionalization was wrong, but that either the institutionalization or the imprisonment that preceded it must inherently be wrong. Either the person is sane and can stand trial (in which case the institutionalization is not legitimate) or the person is not sane and should never have been tried in the first place. One cannot simultaneously be sane or insane. I'm not sure why this point was not argued....
Either way, that's entirely different from directly and explicitly retroactively applying a law to prior convictions after the person has served his or her time. That's just wrong, by any standards of decency, and tends to significantly increase recidivism, which means that it is also harmful to a free society. The Founding Fathers understood this, which is why that clause is in our Constitution in the first place.
An ex post facto law need not criminalize anything. Even laws that add additional punishments after sentencing are considered an ex post facto law. The specious reasoning behind allowing this absurdity is that being put on a sex offender list is not a punishment. And this was the point at which it became perfectly clear that the SCOTUS has lost all touch with reality.
Only in states with progressive governments. And even in California, the government keeps pushing out the deadlines as the power companies fail to meet them, making those regulations much less effective than you might think.
What part of "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed" do they not understand? That's not even pissing on the bill of rights. That's wiping their ass with the body of the Constitution itself.
Or, more likely, will allow a power company to put off adding that new, expensive, green infrastructure that the legislators are pressuring them to use instead of building new generators....
Individually nothing unusual WRT to poisoning, but the precise set of 1) headaches 2) vomiting 3) able to go home almost immediately aka insta-antidote is kind of odd/unusual.
It didn't actually say that they were treated and released. It just said that some were able to go home immediately, which could just mean that they didn't drink enough and weren't ill enough to be concerned about them.
Or it could be bacteria in their water tank (e.g. legionella). If you drink bacterially-infected water, you would expect vomiting, and headaches often accompany it—you can get headaches from just about anything that causes enough stress to raise your blood pressure, which an entire school full of sick kids almost certainly would.... As with any infection, some people would not be sick enough to require hospitalization.
Publishing a copy of a book (without permission) was a crime in 1799, and it should still be a crime today. The author, and original publisher, are both damaged by lost revenue from their more difficult endeavor of creating the original content. Just because every person who has $500 to buy a PC can now copy huge digital works for fractions of a penny, does not erase the essence of intellectual property and its benefits.
I agree with the first part but not necessarily the second or third. The reason publishing a book without permission (commercial piracy) is a crime is that the publisher is a large entity taking advantage of an individual who lacks the resources to pursue justice, hence the criminal statutes. By contrast, an individual sharing contents owned by a megacorp does not cause the same sort of harm.
So for individuals committing copyright violations, I would say that civil penalties are okay, but criminal penalties are an abomination.
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The 15x improvement in density is clear from the summary. However, the current assumption is that automakers will use that higher density to increase distance to something reasonable rather than to decrease the weight of the battery for easier transport. The Chevy Volt battery weighs 400 pounds and provides between 1/6th and 1/12th the range of an average gasoline-powered car. So to achieve range parity, you're still going to need close to a 400 pound battery even with this new battery technology. For an SUV or mini-SUV, the battery might even be over 400 pounds.
As for your other point, you could use multiple packs, of course, but when you do that, each pack needs power connectors, handles, and some sort of solid wall to protect the cell from impact. That costs you a lot of volumetric energy density, and to some extent, weight density. Also, you now need a separate charge controller per pack where otherwise you might have been able to get away with fewer, and that probably translates to more wires as well, which translates to more weight. When you're dealing with high-current DC systems, the weight of wiring can be significant. So there's a non-negligible materials cost and materials weight associated with such a design.
Here's a second reality check: we still have dozens of different sizes and shapes of 12-volt starter batteries some 40 years after the industry switched over from 6-volt batteries. I'd rate the odds of automakers standardizing on a single-digit number of standardized giant lithium-ion packs (and losing much of their competitive advantage in the process) somewhere around the same as the odds of a ball of frozen ice crystals remaining intact inside Satan's lair.
In the way we do now, yes, but even now, does the average person know and care to the same degree? Therein lies the critical question, for in apathy lies the greatest threat to liberty.
The difference is that in the past, such abuses were largely unsuccessful. These days, not so much. The Opium wars didn't result in random drug testing that prevents people from getting jobs because of smoking weed in their free time. It didn't create subcultures of people arrested for sale of drugs who are permanently blackballed from holding jobs in polite society. And so on. We really do have a different set of problems this time.
And book burnings were historically common in the distant past, but most folks thought we were past that point in our cultural development. Then 9/11 happened, and suddenly there are Qur'ans ablaze.
And nobody in history has perfected manipulation of history the way governments have in the last part of the 20th and the first part of the 21st century. The news is filtered by governments to the point that dissenting voices are only allowed to continue as long as they are seen as highly biased partisans. If you get a dissenting voice that isn't obviously strongly biased, but rather evaluates things rationally, it is usually crushed quickly. It's sad that the sole remaining voices of reason and common sense in the news business are relegated to a comedy network.
Technology has significantly altered the balance of power in favor of those who wish to control others. Although it is possible for the public to use technology (encryption, for example) to protect themselves, the majority of people are not savvy enough to do so. It takes the collective effort and understanding of everyone (or nearly everyone) working together to increase freedom and reduce government abuse, whereas it takes only one or two tech-savvy government officials to push the pendulum the other way.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the sky is falling right now, but I've seen the U.S. government do an awful lot of stuff in the past thirteen years that in the prior couple of decades I would never have imagined our country could sink to. In a lot of ways, it is like we're going through McCarthyism all over again, and for those of us born after that crap ended, it comes as something of a shock. Eventually, these bad seeds will likely be uprooted from our government, but each time, it seems like it takes longer to rein in the government abuse. Unless that trend changes, there will eventually come a time when it is no longer possible to rein them in at all. The worst part is that most people won't know it is coming until the sky has fallen, and no one can hear you scream.
Amazon gets this wrong all the time. For example, every time I buy a hard drive, it gives ads for hard drives until I delete them all from my browsing history. I mean yeah, I'll buy more than one hard drive in a lifetime, but I probably won't buy one for at least a year or two. The same goes for pretty much any product except books and movies. You might buy spare blades for that razor or spare cutting discs for that Dremel, but you're unlikely to buy a second razor or a second Dremel, even if it is a different model of razor or Dremel. Oh, and if you bought spare blades for the razor when you bought the razor, you're not going to need spare blades for a while, either, and even when you do, you're not going to need incompatible blades for a different kind of razor. (Okay, so I think all razor blades for razor knives are universal these days, but you get my point.)
The Nissan Leaf draws 34 kWh per 100 miles, or .34 kWh (340 Wh) per mile. So that number is in the right neighborhood, if a little low.
Because automatic hyphenation was added a couple of years ago and CSS has been around since 1996. Changing to use automatic hyphenation by default would thus break existing content. By convention, new features in CSS must be opt-in, not opt-out.
Know an easy and inexpensive way to quickly lift and replace (with reasonable positional accuracy) a battery that weighs 400 pounds? (And that's just the small one in a Chevy Volt.) You'd need a forklift.
Sadly, even such simple things as em dashes in UTF-8 confuse XeLaTeX as shipped, resulting in overfull hbox errors. (Hint: it is always legal to wrap after one.) And if you don't use UTF-8 characters, it also confuses LaTeX by default, but in different ways. (Hint: it is never legal to wrap before an em dash.)
I resorted to starting from XML and programmatically adding wrap hints (zero-length hspace) in the right places to make LaTeX behave. By contrast, every word processor written or released in the past five years gets this right, every text editor, and every web browser. Thus, there's at least one case where LaTeX can require a lot more work to get something that looks good than a word processor does.
The main benefit of XeLaTeX is that it supports modern fonts without the need to manually create metafont files for them. That and support for UTF-8. Although you can probably work around both features if you had to, XeTeX does make life a lot more bearable if you're using custom in-house fonts.
Yeah, but there has been a rash of it lately.
Which is interesting, but wrong, because it incorrectly assumes that the pessimism is misplaced, that the fault therefore lies with the public, and that the science fiction affected the public as a whole. In reality, people are pessimistic about technology in large part because it is so frequently misused and abused, which is largely because the @$^@#$& science fiction writers keep giving world governments ideas. 1984? TVs with webcams. Fahrenheit 451? Book burnings. Brave New World? Witness a public education system that no longer teaches us to question, a drug war resulting in huge subcultures that are shunned from society as a whole, or the mass high fructose corn syrup addiction that addles much of the public. The governments don't read these books and think, "It would suck if society were ruled in a draconian manner," but rather, "Society is going to be ruled in a draconian manner eventually, so I'd better take steps to secure my place at the helm." And this is why science fiction causes the public to become pessimistic about technology.
Because the page designer didn't specify the required CSS. Browsers have supported automatic hyphenation for at least a couple of years.
There are some things that LaTeX can't do even with XeLaTeX that are trivial in even a basic HTML renderer—adding the CSS min-width attribute to a box, for example—you can approximate it by precomputing the typeset length of the string, but it's still an approximation, and takes a screenful of LaTeX code just to define the command.
With the addition of a handful of typographical features such as continuation lines (the "Blah blah (cont'd)" bit at the top of a page when something with a heading is split across a page break), modern HTML and CSS could do pretty much anything LaTeX can do, but far more cleanly, with proper separation of presentation from content and a much better programming model (none of this macro mess).
My point is that it isn't a requirement for the boxes to have that data, and there's no valid reason for the boxes to have or store that data because it does not provide information that is useful forensically, therefore they are unlikely to have that data. Any manufacturer choosing to add such logging on its own, once caught, would get a major black mark in the press, which means no manufacturer would willingly add it unless forced to do so by law. And because the only possible purpose of having GPS in the black box would be to enable the sorts of fishing expeditions you describe, any law requiring the devices to have GPS logging would get the person who suggested it seriously raked over the coals.
Lack of location information. That vehicle could have been on an autobahn at the time, for all the government knows. And if they already have cameras sufficient to prove that you were in the state at the time, they also have cameras sufficient to prove you were speeding without the need for the black box.
Until you find yourself writing your own document classes or other custom macro sets. Then, there are an infinite number of reasons why just about anything is better than LaTeX.
On the other hand, all of the patent troll lawsuits that have ever been filed were filed only because someone called their bluff. The reason people settle is that A. some of the patent trolls are too clueless to know that they are bluffing, and B.when they file suit anyway, the cost of defending the lawsuit could easily exceed the requested settlement.
A better way to prevent patent trolls is to develop a reputation for stomping them into the ground with countersuits (ideally, before they even have the chance to file their lawsuit). Even if they have never produced a product, you can still pull together undeclared prior art and sue to have pretty much their entire patent portfolio overturned. Do that a couple of times and the trolls will think twice about talking to you unless they have successfully sued a fair number of other companies first. :-)
First, I'm not giving any advice here. Second, I'm failing to see how the legal code you're linking to disagrees with my comment that federal law does not absolutely prevent a felon from owning a gun. As far as I can tell, there are two situations in which this can legally occur:
Unless I'm missing something significant, the federal laws you cite above only cover two types of sale: interstate/international sales and sales by licensed dealers/collectors. Am I missing something?
Technically it isn't illegal for a felon to own a gun, only for a licensed dealer to sell a gun to a felon. Private sales between individuals are not impeded. I'm not saying it isn't potentially a punishment, but it isn't nearly as clear cut.
Also, United States v. Comstock didn't cover the ex post facto question. It covered only whether it was within the authority of the Federal Government to pass such a law. The question of whether it violated the right to not have additional punishments imposed by a law passed after sentencing was not the issue before the court. Because the government has always had the right to force the institutionalization of the insane, this was a ridiculous approach for trying to overturn the law.
The correct argument was not that the institutionalization was wrong, but that either the institutionalization or the imprisonment that preceded it must inherently be wrong. Either the person is sane and can stand trial (in which case the institutionalization is not legitimate) or the person is not sane and should never have been tried in the first place. One cannot simultaneously be sane or insane. I'm not sure why this point was not argued....
Either way, that's entirely different from directly and explicitly retroactively applying a law to prior convictions after the person has served his or her time. That's just wrong, by any standards of decency, and tends to significantly increase recidivism, which means that it is also harmful to a free society. The Founding Fathers understood this, which is why that clause is in our Constitution in the first place.
An ex post facto law need not criminalize anything. Even laws that add additional punishments after sentencing are considered an ex post facto law. The specious reasoning behind allowing this absurdity is that being put on a sex offender list is not a punishment. And this was the point at which it became perfectly clear that the SCOTUS has lost all touch with reality.
Only in states with progressive governments. And even in California, the government keeps pushing out the deadlines as the power companies fail to meet them, making those regulations much less effective than you might think.
What part of "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed" do they not understand? That's not even pissing on the bill of rights. That's wiping their ass with the body of the Constitution itself.
Simply amazing.
Or, more likely, will allow a power company to put off adding that new, expensive, green infrastructure that the legislators are pressuring them to use instead of building new generators....
It didn't actually say that they were treated and released. It just said that some were able to go home immediately, which could just mean that they didn't drink enough and weren't ill enough to be concerned about them.
Or it could be bacteria in their water tank (e.g. legionella). If you drink bacterially-infected water, you would expect vomiting, and headaches often accompany it—you can get headaches from just about anything that causes enough stress to raise your blood pressure, which an entire school full of sick kids almost certainly would.... As with any infection, some people would not be sick enough to require hospitalization.
...it is shown in Google Maps? More to the point, how long before long, straight stretches of seabed start to affect driving directions?
Step 23: Swim across the Marianas Trench.
I agree with the first part but not necessarily the second or third. The reason publishing a book without permission (commercial piracy) is a crime is that the publisher is a large entity taking advantage of an individual who lacks the resources to pursue justice, hence the criminal statutes. By contrast, an individual sharing contents owned by a megacorp does not cause the same sort of harm.
So for individuals committing copyright violations, I would say that civil penalties are okay, but criminal penalties are an abomination.