There have been electric delivery trucks for a long time - for example, Smith Electric Vehicles has been making li-ion trucks almost as long as Tesla has been around. And they follow up on a long history of electric delivery vehicles on a continuous line dating back to the early lead-acid days. But "existing" doesn't mean "having blown the market wide open". The big question is when that could happen.
You know, though, as ridiculous as it sounds, I almost wonder Tesla's efforts could evolve into a killer delivery vehicle. The Model S / Model X drivetrain is already starting to get into the power range of a big rig, and big rig budgets can afford their high prices. Combine that this potential solution to charging over long distances and you really could have a winner.
I wouldn't count on really powerful fast chargers ever getting really cheap. Cheaper than they are now, sure, but just ignoring all of the communication and high power conversion hardware you still have to have:
1) A powerful cooling system in your charger (for a really powerful connection, you even need to liquid-cool the charging cable) 2) A huge amount of copper (or aluminum, but that comes with a number of additional challenges) in your charger 3) A high power feed installed to your location 4) A high capacity and high power battery buffer to even out your charges if you want really fast charges / fast charges for big packs (say, 250+ kW) 5) A professional electrician to do the installs (and remember, we're not talking about home wiring here, we're talking about huge-current high-voltage connections).... and so forth. These things will always add up. So maybe we'd not be talking about $100k to add one.... but I'd be shocked if even in mass production they could be manufactured, delivered and installed for under $10k. Probably several tens of thousands of USD per unit.
I wouldn't be surprised if they could get some more specific clues on what water it's been in - for example, marine growth species types or isotopic ratios - to help pin it down better than just general drift calculations (lots of places could dump debris on Réunion). There are could also be potential clues on how much sun or what temperatures it's been exposed to, such as rates of plastic degradation, and perhaps that might also help give them better ideas of what areas it's been in based on weather patterns since the flight was lost.
There are so many potential clues... each one rather vague on its own, but all together, I imagine they'll get pointed in the right direction.
While in general I think battery swapping is a stupid idea for cars (there's way too much need for different form factors, capacities, performance capabilities, etc, and it makes up such an integral part of the structure due to its size and mass and represents such a great amount of capital one would have to stockpile), I think it could actually work incredibly well for trucks. Rather than having them in the cab, I picture them slotting under the trailers (where various hardware is already often slotted), with a power connection to the cab. It would in such a situation be very easy to have a single form factor for the batteries and very easy to remove and reinstall them - you already have a standardized shape, easy undercarriage access, and the structural strength is already right where you need it. And whenever a truck picks up a new trailer that's been sitting around for a while, it could be already charged and ready to go. The cab would of course need its own batteries to haul itself around a good distance when not towing a load, but the trailers could basically hold the power for their own towing needs. And it would have little effect on an empty trailer's cost - it just needs the mounts for the batteries installed and the wiring to feed the cab, but would otherwise be a normal trailer haulable by any vehicle.
Indeed - and they can sell people on the concept pretty easily. Rather than saying "We're going to have you charge inside our store to tempt you to buy things", they'd sell the concept as "Remember back in the day when you used to have to fill up your car with gasoline out in the cold / heat / wind / rain / etc? Now we're enabling you to charge your car in comfort indoors in our stores because we love the environment so much and want to support people like you - you're welcome!"
Indeed, the slower fill times on even 10-minute fast charging stations would probably give a much better rate on converting energy-customers into convenience store customers. It could even be a loss leader, so long as there's enough market penetration to justify the capital costs.
Now, for electric cars to put them out of business, they'd have to be a relevant percentage of total vehicles - and overall, that will certainly take time. But the case becomes different in specialty markets. Different states and localities will (and already do) offer different EV incentives, and the natural use case for EVs varies between locations (urban/suburban/rural, mild vs. hot vs. cold climate, terrain, geography (isolated islands or areas without good road connects to the outside world, for example), areas with different driver profiles, and so forth). So an overall EV adoption rate of 1% might actually be 10%, 20% or more in certain areas. That could well be enough to start driving gas stations out of business in such areas, creating a potential contageon effect.
That said, business owners aren't stupid, and one expects them to adapt. For example, where appropriate one would expect gas stations to respond to increasing EV penetration by adding rapid charge stations. Electricity is cheap, but if someone needs a rapid charge (for a road trip or whatnot), they'll pay the going rate, even if it's similar to the cost of gasoline per unit distance traveled. They're not just going to say "meh, I'll just plug into a wall socket and wait overnight". So if you have an existing gas station with all of its capital costs of installing tanks and pumps already paid for, one would expect them to keep selling gasoline even as an increasing percentage of their customers switch over to electricity. Maybe they'll find it cheaper to remove broken pumps than fix them. Maybe they'll eventually hit a point where it's no longer cost effective to maintain their fuel tanks and have to stop selling gasoline altogether. But neither of these things are a "suddenly going out of business because EVs just showed up" scenario.
(Of course, there's a counter to what I just wrote, which is that - given that only a small percentage of EV charging will ever be fast charging - you're looking at a smaller potential market)
Voltron [33] is a language designed for distributed mobile sensing. Voltron allows the developer to specify the logic to be executed at several locations, without having to dictate how the robots must coordinate to achieve the objectives...
Why did you create a brand new programming language rather than just a library? I looked at the examples and I don't see any functionality in there that can't just as easily be accomplished with current programming languages and a simple library.
127.0.0.1 is clearly unresponsible to DMCA takedown efforts; legal approaches simply won't suffice. I recommend that Universal Pictures launch a coordinated effort hack into it using as many computers as possible, gain root access, and write over its hard drive.
"For example both alcohol (ethanol) and water produce large peaks on an IR spectrum and from the video it would seem that the user provides some background data on what the sample is via the app, so that saves a lot of work. It would be easy for the algorithm to say, 'the user says this is drink and I can see that about 40 per cent of the total spectrum is ethanol so I should give a reading of alcoholic beverage with 40 per cent alcohol content'. Or 'this is a plant and 70 per cent of the spectrum is water so it must be 70 per cent hydrated'. This could also be done with total sugar content for common sugars such as sucrose and fructose," he said.
"Similarly, it would be possible to get a spectrum good enough to recognise something like fruit or Tylenol and then send back generic data (easily found via Google)
That would hardly be useless. I presume that the person knows whether what they're looking at is a fruit or an alcoholic beverage. It's not a big deal to ask the user to do whatever degree of categorization that they can to help it out. And being able to pick out common drugs? Definitely not useless.
Thanks for your insights. Still trying to decide whether something like this should go on my wish list;) (see above for my potential uses).
How accurate, exactly, do you think such a device could be? Obviously it's not going to be pulling out the sort of precision of a professional spectrometer. But you mention, for example, being able to identify the signatures of herbicides and pesticides. Do you mean, for example, "This contains imidacloprid", or more like, "This contains a nicotinoid of some variety"?
How useful do you think it could be on identifying mineral species - say, distinguishing between different zeolites? Or, back to food, if given, say, a mango, to get readings of, say, water, sugar (in general, or specific sugars), fat (in general, or specific categories of fats, or specific fats), protein (in general, or specific categories of proteins, or specific common protiens... obviously it's not going to be able to pull out 5 ppb of Some-Complex-Unique-Protein), common vitamins (generally found in dozens of ppm quantity - some more, some less), minerals (likewise), etc?
Smartphones are still drastically slower than individual PCs, let alone cloud services.
I know they're overstating the case, and that it's a near-IR spectrometer, not a mass spectrometer. That said, I still like the general concept. Does anyone know whether near-IR spectroscopy can be used for identifying mineral species (for example, between different types of zeolites and the like)? I love rock hunting but many species have similar visual appearances.
And even on the food standpoint I find it interesting... I'm a tropical plant nut, and lots of people I know over on the forum breed unusual varieties of common fruits as well as rare fruits (some of which don't even have scientific names). It's be neat to be able to get a basic compositional profile - no, not "this fruit contains X ppb of this gigantic-complex-unique-protein", but just the major constituents. It'd help, for example, the mango breeders to know if their fruits are compositionally different from the fruit of the parent cultivar.
I've cut a plastic binding with a sharp rock. I didn't knap it myself, it was naturally sharp, but... I don't think it gets much more old school than that;) Unless there's someone here who made productive use of throwing their own excrement in a production environment.
I agree with most of what you wrote. But I have the most interest in sample returns because we have such vastly greater analysis capabilities here on Earth than we could ever send on a mission - especially a lower budget mission. And by leaving off surface science hardware, you save development costs and a significant amount of spacecraft mass.
Also, capturing samples, you don't have to land to have a low impact velocity. If you reach Saturn via ion propulsion then you could at little cost enter a Molniya-like orbit over the plumes so that the spacecraft would be nearly stationary relative to the particles during collection. Enceladus orbits are slow to begin with due to the low gravity (0,114m/s versus Earth's 9,81), and by positioning a high apogee or near-apogee over the plumes it might even be possible to collect jet material at lower impact velocity than one could from the ground. Enceladus's gravity would contribute to decelerating the particles and, if desired, one could have the probe's ascent phase over the plumes (rather than the apogee) for further relative velocity reduction. Impact velocity would be not much more than the random variation between the particles' individual trajectories, and some would impact with near-zero velocity. Combined with a carbon aerogel collector (much less dense than the silica aerogel used by Stardust), I seriously doubt you'd do any damage at all to what's collected - most particles shouldn't even melt.
Every added system is added mass and development cost; landers don't usually come cheap, even on a low-gravity body like Enceladus. And dropping a lander near potentially unpredictable fissure geysers carries a risk. So I personally tend to favor spaceborne collection. That said, one would probably learn more from the surface, and you'd be able to sample surface ices as well, not just plumes.
You think having the part designed to handle five times the load it actually experienced to not be "with sufficient margin"? How much of a margin do you want them to put, 100x?
RTFA. They were doing statistical-sampling quality control testing of struts. The problem was that most of them were just fine, but there were a very small number which were totally defective and broke at a tiny fraction of their rated value. And no, SpaceX did not make the parts, it was an outside supplier. And yes, SpaceX A) will now be testing 100% of them, and B) is ditching the supplier.
It's not just about the cost of a failed launch, there's also a huge cost to a company's reputation if a rocket fails. And to their schedule.
Out of curiosity, is there any lightweight way to sense how close a part is to failure *in use*? I mean, finding defects on the ground is great, no question. But what if something would doom a mission not due to a part having a manufacturing defect, but due to an oversight somewhere in the rocket design process, or assembly, or transportation, or launch setup, or unexpected weather conditions, or whatnot? It seems to me it could be a massive boost to launch reliability if one knew that a part was about to fail - for example, in this case, the computers could automatically have throttled back to the rocket to reduce stresses, at the cost of expending more propellant, and possibly been able to salvage the mission. And then the problem could be remedied for future missions, without having to have a launch failure first.
To pick a random, for example, would there potentially be a change in resistance or capacitance or other electrical properties when a strut nears its breaking point?
Obviously, though, if adding sensing hardware would add a high weight or cost penalty, that would be unrealistic.
Funny;) But the main point is that its surface is high radiation and very oxidizing; and as far as we know there's no liquids anywhere on Mars except for possible transients or extremely perchlorate-rich brines (aka, something you'd use to sterilize a rock of life).
On the other hand, subsurface water oceans are common elsewhere in the solar system, and colder bodies are known and/or theorized to have a wide range of alternative liquids.
Also, maybe it's just because I've never worked in that industry before, maybe it's common practice in rocketry, but is anyone else impressed with the use of sound triangulation to figure out which part broke? I've never heard of that being done before.
Sad that the Falcon Heavy won't be launched until next spring, I've been really looking forward to that. Oh well...
Elon is surely really fuming about this one, as I know from past interviews with him that he really doesn't like having to source hardware from outside suppliers. He has the old "robber baron" mindset of wanting to get the whole production chain start-to-finish in house, and it's one of the things that really frustrated him when he started Tesla: at the time of the last interview I read on the subject (something like 3 or 4 years ago), he had gotten SpaceX up to 80% in-house, but Tesla was only up to 20% in-house. Car manufacture has long been all about sourcing parts from a wide range of outside suppliers.
But even at 80% in-house at SpaceX, looks like that remaining 20% still bit them : Seriously, failing at 1/5th the rated failure value? The vendor might as well have given them a cardboard cutout with the word "strut" written on it in sharpie.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been electric delivery trucks for a long time - for example, Smith Electric Vehicles has been making li-ion trucks almost as long as Tesla has been around. And they follow up on a long history of electric delivery vehicles on a continuous line dating back to the early lead-acid days. But "existing" doesn't mean "having blown the market wide open". The big question is when that could happen.
You know, though, as ridiculous as it sounds, I almost wonder Tesla's efforts could evolve into a killer delivery vehicle. The Model S / Model X drivetrain is already starting to get into the power range of a big rig, and big rig budgets can afford their high prices. Combine that this potential solution to charging over long distances and you really could have a winner.
I wouldn't count on really powerful fast chargers ever getting really cheap. Cheaper than they are now, sure, but just ignoring all of the communication and high power conversion hardware you still have to have:
1) A powerful cooling system in your charger (for a really powerful connection, you even need to liquid-cool the charging cable) ... and so forth. These things will always add up. So maybe we'd not be talking about $100k to add one.... but I'd be shocked if even in mass production they could be manufactured, delivered and installed for under $10k. Probably several tens of thousands of USD per unit.
2) A huge amount of copper (or aluminum, but that comes with a number of additional challenges) in your charger
3) A high power feed installed to your location
4) A high capacity and high power battery buffer to even out your charges if you want really fast charges / fast charges for big packs (say, 250+ kW)
5) A professional electrician to do the installs (and remember, we're not talking about home wiring here, we're talking about huge-current high-voltage connections).
I wouldn't be surprised if they could get some more specific clues on what water it's been in - for example, marine growth species types or isotopic ratios - to help pin it down better than just general drift calculations (lots of places could dump debris on Réunion). There are could also be potential clues on how much sun or what temperatures it's been exposed to, such as rates of plastic degradation, and perhaps that might also help give them better ideas of what areas it's been in based on weather patterns since the flight was lost.
There are so many potential clues... each one rather vague on its own, but all together, I imagine they'll get pointed in the right direction.
And costs about a third as much to drive per unit distance.
The cost of a vehicle is not its raw purchase price.
While in general I think battery swapping is a stupid idea for cars (there's way too much need for different form factors, capacities, performance capabilities, etc, and it makes up such an integral part of the structure due to its size and mass and represents such a great amount of capital one would have to stockpile), I think it could actually work incredibly well for trucks. Rather than having them in the cab, I picture them slotting under the trailers (where various hardware is already often slotted), with a power connection to the cab. It would in such a situation be very easy to have a single form factor for the batteries and very easy to remove and reinstall them - you already have a standardized shape, easy undercarriage access, and the structural strength is already right where you need it. And whenever a truck picks up a new trailer that's been sitting around for a while, it could be already charged and ready to go. The cab would of course need its own batteries to haul itself around a good distance when not towing a load, but the trailers could basically hold the power for their own towing needs. And it would have little effect on an empty trailer's cost - it just needs the mounts for the batteries installed and the wiring to feed the cab, but would otherwise be a normal trailer haulable by any vehicle.
Indeed - and they can sell people on the concept pretty easily. Rather than saying "We're going to have you charge inside our store to tempt you to buy things", they'd sell the concept as "Remember back in the day when you used to have to fill up your car with gasoline out in the cold / heat / wind / rain / etc? Now we're enabling you to charge your car in comfort indoors in our stores because we love the environment so much and want to support people like you - you're welcome!"
Big rigs don't stop at your average corner gas station.
Indeed, the slower fill times on even 10-minute fast charging stations would probably give a much better rate on converting energy-customers into convenience store customers. It could even be a loss leader, so long as there's enough market penetration to justify the capital costs.
Now, for electric cars to put them out of business, they'd have to be a relevant percentage of total vehicles - and overall, that will certainly take time. But the case becomes different in specialty markets. Different states and localities will (and already do) offer different EV incentives, and the natural use case for EVs varies between locations (urban/suburban/rural, mild vs. hot vs. cold climate, terrain, geography (isolated islands or areas without good road connects to the outside world, for example), areas with different driver profiles, and so forth). So an overall EV adoption rate of 1% might actually be 10%, 20% or more in certain areas. That could well be enough to start driving gas stations out of business in such areas, creating a potential contageon effect.
That said, business owners aren't stupid, and one expects them to adapt. For example, where appropriate one would expect gas stations to respond to increasing EV penetration by adding rapid charge stations. Electricity is cheap, but if someone needs a rapid charge (for a road trip or whatnot), they'll pay the going rate, even if it's similar to the cost of gasoline per unit distance traveled. They're not just going to say "meh, I'll just plug into a wall socket and wait overnight". So if you have an existing gas station with all of its capital costs of installing tanks and pumps already paid for, one would expect them to keep selling gasoline even as an increasing percentage of their customers switch over to electricity. Maybe they'll find it cheaper to remove broken pumps than fix them. Maybe they'll eventually hit a point where it's no longer cost effective to maintain their fuel tanks and have to stop selling gasoline altogether. But neither of these things are a "suddenly going out of business because EVs just showed up" scenario.
(Of course, there's a counter to what I just wrote, which is that - given that only a small percentage of EV charging will ever be fast charging - you're looking at a smaller potential market)
You can be a lot more subtle - tell them that your host is xbcd.com
I always keep an "atashi" or "eg" subdomain on my sites configured thusly ;)
Um... read the paper, page 10.....
Why did you create a brand new programming language rather than just a library? I looked at the examples and I don't see any functionality in there that can't just as easily be accomplished with current programming languages and a simple library.
Google should interpret Universal's request to delist "127.0.0.1" as "We want you to delist us" and promptly oblige ;)
127.0.0.1 is clearly unresponsible to DMCA takedown efforts; legal approaches simply won't suffice. I recommend that Universal Pictures launch a coordinated effort hack into it using as many computers as possible, gain root access, and write over its hard drive.
That actually doesn't sound that bad:
That would hardly be useless. I presume that the person knows whether what they're looking at is a fruit or an alcoholic beverage. It's not a big deal to ask the user to do whatever degree of categorization that they can to help it out. And being able to pick out common drugs? Definitely not useless.
Thanks for your insights. Still trying to decide whether something like this should go on my wish list ;) (see above for my potential uses).
How accurate, exactly, do you think such a device could be? Obviously it's not going to be pulling out the sort of precision of a professional spectrometer. But you mention, for example, being able to identify the signatures of herbicides and pesticides. Do you mean, for example, "This contains imidacloprid", or more like, "This contains a nicotinoid of some variety"?
How useful do you think it could be on identifying mineral species - say, distinguishing between different zeolites? Or, back to food, if given, say, a mango, to get readings of, say, water, sugar (in general, or specific sugars), fat (in general, or specific categories of fats, or specific fats), protein (in general, or specific categories of proteins, or specific common protiens... obviously it's not going to be able to pull out 5 ppb of Some-Complex-Unique-Protein), common vitamins (generally found in dozens of ppm quantity - some more, some less), minerals (likewise), etc?
Smartphones are still drastically slower than individual PCs, let alone cloud services.
I know they're overstating the case, and that it's a near-IR spectrometer, not a mass spectrometer. That said, I still like the general concept. Does anyone know whether near-IR spectroscopy can be used for identifying mineral species (for example, between different types of zeolites and the like)? I love rock hunting but many species have similar visual appearances.
And even on the food standpoint I find it interesting... I'm a tropical plant nut, and lots of people I know over on the forum breed unusual varieties of common fruits as well as rare fruits (some of which don't even have scientific names). It's be neat to be able to get a basic compositional profile - no, not "this fruit contains X ppb of this gigantic-complex-unique-protein", but just the major constituents. It'd help, for example, the mango breeders to know if their fruits are compositionally different from the fruit of the parent cultivar.
I've cut a plastic binding with a sharp rock. I didn't knap it myself, it was naturally sharp, but... I don't think it gets much more old school than that ;) Unless there's someone here who made productive use of throwing their own excrement in a production environment.
Combining multiple high res adjacent pictures here.
This is magnificent - I count at least ten different types of terrain in just this tiny part of Pluto. What a world.
And IMHO it looks even more like subglacial liquids at play now.
I agree with most of what you wrote. But I have the most interest in sample returns because we have such vastly greater analysis capabilities here on Earth than we could ever send on a mission - especially a lower budget mission. And by leaving off surface science hardware, you save development costs and a significant amount of spacecraft mass.
Also, capturing samples, you don't have to land to have a low impact velocity. If you reach Saturn via ion propulsion then you could at little cost enter a Molniya-like orbit over the plumes so that the spacecraft would be nearly stationary relative to the particles during collection. Enceladus orbits are slow to begin with due to the low gravity (0,114m/s versus Earth's 9,81), and by positioning a high apogee or near-apogee over the plumes it might even be possible to collect jet material at lower impact velocity than one could from the ground. Enceladus's gravity would contribute to decelerating the particles and, if desired, one could have the probe's ascent phase over the plumes (rather than the apogee) for further relative velocity reduction. Impact velocity would be not much more than the random variation between the particles' individual trajectories, and some would impact with near-zero velocity. Combined with a carbon aerogel collector (much less dense than the silica aerogel used by Stardust), I seriously doubt you'd do any damage at all to what's collected - most particles shouldn't even melt.
Every added system is added mass and development cost; landers don't usually come cheap, even on a low-gravity body like Enceladus. And dropping a lander near potentially unpredictable fissure geysers carries a risk. So I personally tend to favor spaceborne collection. That said, one would probably learn more from the surface, and you'd be able to sample surface ices as well, not just plumes.
You think having the part designed to handle five times the load it actually experienced to not be "with sufficient margin"? How much of a margin do you want them to put, 100x?
RTFA. They were doing statistical-sampling quality control testing of struts. The problem was that most of them were just fine, but there were a very small number which were totally defective and broke at a tiny fraction of their rated value. And no, SpaceX did not make the parts, it was an outside supplier. And yes, SpaceX A) will now be testing 100% of them, and B) is ditching the supplier.
It's not just about the cost of a failed launch, there's also a huge cost to a company's reputation if a rocket fails. And to their schedule.
Out of curiosity, is there any lightweight way to sense how close a part is to failure *in use*? I mean, finding defects on the ground is great, no question. But what if something would doom a mission not due to a part having a manufacturing defect, but due to an oversight somewhere in the rocket design process, or assembly, or transportation, or launch setup, or unexpected weather conditions, or whatnot? It seems to me it could be a massive boost to launch reliability if one knew that a part was about to fail - for example, in this case, the computers could automatically have throttled back to the rocket to reduce stresses, at the cost of expending more propellant, and possibly been able to salvage the mission. And then the problem could be remedied for future missions, without having to have a launch failure first.
To pick a random, for example, would there potentially be a change in resistance or capacitance or other electrical properties when a strut nears its breaking point?
Obviously, though, if adding sensing hardware would add a high weight or cost penalty, that would be unrealistic.
Funny ;) But the main point is that its surface is high radiation and very oxidizing; and as far as we know there's no liquids anywhere on Mars except for possible transients or extremely perchlorate-rich brines (aka, something you'd use to sterilize a rock of life).
On the other hand, subsurface water oceans are common elsewhere in the solar system, and colder bodies are known and/or theorized to have a wide range of alternative liquids.
Also, maybe it's just because I've never worked in that industry before, maybe it's common practice in rocketry, but is anyone else impressed with the use of sound triangulation to figure out which part broke? I've never heard of that being done before.
Sad that the Falcon Heavy won't be launched until next spring, I've been really looking forward to that. Oh well...
Elon is surely really fuming about this one, as I know from past interviews with him that he really doesn't like having to source hardware from outside suppliers. He has the old "robber baron" mindset of wanting to get the whole production chain start-to-finish in house, and it's one of the things that really frustrated him when he started Tesla: at the time of the last interview I read on the subject (something like 3 or 4 years ago), he had gotten SpaceX up to 80% in-house, but Tesla was only up to 20% in-house. Car manufacture has long been all about sourcing parts from a wide range of outside suppliers.
But even at 80% in-house at SpaceX, looks like that remaining 20% still bit them : Seriously, failing at 1/5th the rated failure value? The vendor might as well have given them a cardboard cutout with the word "strut" written on it in sharpie.