Joan Rivers' film, The Girl Most Likely To, was at one time (1970s) the most played movie on television. It hasn't appeared for many years, but it's really what made her rich. It's about a girl who was geeky and ugly and picked on in high school. As if things couldn't get any worse for her, she becomes disfigured in a terrible car wreck. But after the required plastic surgery she emerges a total hottie, and uses her looks to get revenge on every man who wronged her, by luring them to their deaths.
Another low budget wonder is Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a Russ Meyer film penned by Roger Ebert. The opening scene showing glances going around a room at a party is worth the rental, cheesy 60s film kitsch at its best.
Though big business runs on big deals, many smaller projects are actually a lot more profitable. The most profitable movies of all time, in a ROI sense, have been low budget ones. Some notable ones are Stranger than Paradise, which I've heard cost under $30k to make, another $100k to market, but has made millions since, not to mention making Screamin' Jay Hawkins' a household name (well not quite, but...). Another is Sex, Lies, and Videotape, which also cost just a few hundred thousand dollars, and has made tens of millions.
Both these films and their directors were critically acclaimed, and have been highly hyped. Many young directors have done brilliant work, but nothing gets you noticed like making money.
If this thing is really waterproof, or even highly water resistant, that would be a first, AFAIK. I've been looking for a waterproof phone for years, and I'm awfully surprised no one has offered it.
I think of all those surfers in southern CA who would love to be able to call home and ask when dinner will be ready. Sony sports phone anyone? Talk about untapped potential...
No one but a fashion fiend needs a wrist phone, but a waterproof Star-tac that fits in a pocket would be a boon to many.
Seriously, many of us who work outside are in dire need of waterproof phones. Whether it's doing a wet job or getting caught in the rain, keeping a cell phone dry is a real pain. Most of them die at the first drop of water.
How is the coverage of the broadband service? If you pay the $99, do you get a broadband connection wherever there's digital coverage? Also, does the $99 plan require a contract, or can you do it month to month like you can with their other options? Also, if I add Canada to my national (US) plan, will it work up there?
I have Verizon but I've never gotten around to trying the regular free service. 14.4k may be slow, but it's plenty fast for email. Now that the cables are available cheap I'll have to give it a go.
SMS may be cheaper in Europe, but in the US it's the other way around. You pay 10 cents a message *extra* no matter what, while any voice call you make is usually with the already-paid-for minutes included with your plan.
So in the US, SMS is mostly a zooty novelty service for gadget freaks and people with unlimited expense accounts. In reality it adds little value but much cost, so it hasn't caught on.
...it's Microsoft's management who refuses to implement even the most basic security measures. Windows' default installations have everything but the kitchen sink up and running. Everyday programs like Outlook Express have huge security holes, and even the ones that can be plugged are wide open in the default installation. Microsoft ought to keep its mouth shut until it starts to address these very basic issues.
Patents not adversarial like other courts...
on
Browser Cookie Patent
·
· Score: 5, Informative
One of the main differences between patent courts and the rest of the court system is that patent court is not adversarial by design. When you go for a patent, you're not under such a heavy burden to prove you're worthy of it. And it's not the government's job to prove you're not, or even to put up a challenge. Other courts are adversarial by design. Each side does whatever it can to prove they're right and the other is wrong. Out of this emerges a winner and a loser. The patent system is not like that. Instead of a right and a wrong, we're left with two maybes, and potentially some new barriers to free commerce.
Why bureaucracies grow like cancer...
on
Browser Cookie Patent
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The USPTO measures its own net income with all the sophistication of a dot-com, focusing only on the top line--application fees.
Well, that's how every government agency works. The top line, the amount of money coming in, through fees, funding, etc., is the amount controlled by the people in charge. And in bureaucracies, that's everything -- your worth as an administrator, your salary, and your political power, is defined by how big a budget you control, and how many people you have under you. So bureaucrats do whatever they can to increase their budgets.
Charging money for individual messages is a ridiculous idea. We have other spam solutions that work very well -- smart filters. If you're a mail admin, you need to get familiar with Spamassasin and other tools like it. They work. Personally, I use PopFilter on my laptop, and it works beautifully. I get 2-300 messages a day, of which about 5% are legit. PopFilter handles this flawlessly.
Before this, HP was supposed to be offering their own Linux distribution, which seemed stupid to me. Why incur all that extra development and support cost, when you're never going to be the next Redhat anyway? Companies like HP should have been on the Linux bandwagon years ago, but they stalled only because they couldn't figure out how to stamp their own brand on it. This is asinine, but typical of corporate dinosaurs like HP. Shareholders should be very upset. It's high time HP just grabbed a good distribution and went with it.
It would be really neat if a big company standardized on Debian, but still kept its fingers out of it, in a sense of true community spirit. It's not that weird an idea.
I don't see what the big deal is. My IBM T20 gets no more than a little warm, even when doing CPU-intensive stuff.
One of the problems is this stupid race to the most megahertz. Hardly anyone needs a computer that fast, let alone a laptop. How many of you are doing 3D rendering, professional Photoshop work, or heavy duty web/database serving from your laptop? The first two practically require a CRT, the third just doesn't happen in the real world. And wanker gamers don't count...
Limewire and Kazaaa are both Java apps too, and they run fine on an old, slow box -- as long as you have enough RAM. If you're stuck with 128MB RAM and you're running Linux, just switch to a lightweight window manager like Ice and have at it.
The US is still the vanguard of research and development. Even when these things come from Japanese companies, they're most often developed in the US, by Americans.
I don't know who designs Toshiba's fuel cells specifically, or where, but almost all Toshiba's other engineering is done in Irvine, CA -- by people from all over, but usually Americans. Almost all are graduates of American univerisities, though.
The houses that have lasted a hundred years are the good ones. There were many more bad ones, virtually all of which have disappeared. The people we know as "Victorians" were the rich people of a hundred years ago, who could afford houses with lots of gingerbread, tile, fine woodwork, and other expensive, craftsmanlike touches. These people were relatively richer than the rich people of today, so the homes you're thinking about were even beyond the MTV Cribs and HG channel stuff.
Even the smaller, more low-key homes that are revered today, such as Greene and Greene's craftsmans, were premium products for the well-heeled. They've lasted so long and appear so well-made now, becuase no expense was spared back then.
Do some research into some of these old neighborhoods, and see who used to live there. It wasn't average folks, trust me.
I think most of the Republican Party's core values are good, and would benefit this country, so voting Republican is a pragmatic decision to get those policies implemented....if they would actually implement them. That's the problem with the Republican party -- they do exactly the opposite of what they say they're going to do. They run on a platform of fiscal conservatism, but when they get there they spend us into the poorhouse. This has been true of every Republican administration of the last 30 years (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I), and now it's happening again.
The other problem is that Republicans have a "lets' starve the beast" attitude toward government, rather than the "let's manage this better" attitude that's needed. After all, some functions of government *are* necessary. This ensures that any money that is spent is just throwing good money after bad, which is worse than spending a lot but actually getting something for it.
Finally, the Republican party does not tolerate healthy debate or dissent within its ranks. Anyone who goes against party bosses' wishes is punished or marginalized. I used to be a registered Republican, until I figured out that they really are a bunch of fascists.
Liberal-conservative is a phony paradigm that defines the parameters of the debates in a rather silly fashion
I agree, it's a model that no longer resembles reality in any way. Both parties have their big spenders and tighwads, both parties have their Bible-thumpers and libertines, and both parties have their big-money "clients" (often the same ones). But as a "small-l," "social" libertarian who puts a high value on pragmatism, I find myself completely orphaned these days.
Spam is just one more area where Microsoft is neglecting their customers' needs. For all the years we've been on the internet, Microsoft has offered its users *nothing* but some rudimentary filters in Outlook Express and Outlook. As usual, this demonstrates that Microsoft *does not care* about its users.
I've used several spam filtering systems, all of which work extremely well. Right now I'm using POPFilter with Outlook Express. It works great. The one thing that would make it perfect, and I mean perfect, is an automatic whitelist of my addressbook. I haven't bothered to try to do that because I'm not a MS/Win32 or Perl programmer. But there's no reason why this code, or some Win32 implementation of it, couldn't be incorporated into Outlook Express for the benefit of Joe User -- without usability problems.
Again, these spam filters are very effective. Since Outlook Express is by far the most common mail client on the internet, building good spam filtering into it would stop most spam dead in its tracks. The only reason it flourishes is that most of it does get through, and getting it through is so easy and cheap. If this were made just a little harder, there would be a lot less incentive to try. The problem is, no one with any influence (MS and its users) is even putting up a fight.
Blame Microsoft for falling down on the job -- again.
I think you meant to say "SUVs with 30 mpg city, 40 mpg hwy are feasible too"--unless these hypothetical diesel electric engines are less efficient on the highway than in stop-and-go traffic?
Nope. A hybrid SUV could deliver 40 mpg at low speeds in stop and go traffic. But there's no getting around an SUV's barn-door aerodynamics -- it takes a lot of power to push it through the air at highway speeds. Thus the lower highway number.
Most people could probably live closer to work, or work closer to home, than they do right now, but there are tradeoffs to make, and I don't think this can be solved by planning.
Oh, yes it can, and it's being done succssfully in many places. The most successful cities are the best planned ones -- if not from the outset, then when planners are involved in redevelopment. As I said, there's plenty written on this...
Sometimes the job you want just doesn't exist near where you want to live
Instead, we should concentrate on a few other things first, which are immediately achievable, and ultimately more useful, in both the short and long term.
First, we need to get the sulfur out of diesel fuel. I'm taking this first because it's a no-brainer, and the current policy is too little, much too late. US standards for diesel are lower than Europe's, which is why we can't have their terrific, new-generation diesel cars. The average small car can, and does (over there) get 40+ mpg, without hybrid technology. Look at the Jetta Diesel -- it easily beats the Civic Hybrid, with no high-tech fancy stuff. The thing is, that's not even the best of the breed. Plus, if we get the sulfur out of the diesel, we can also clean up our industrial diesel engines considerably, which are the second biggest source of pollution in many areas.
Second, we do need that high-tech fancy stuff -- hybrid cars are terrific. Designs like the Insight/Civic are simply a better way to build a car, for a variety of reasons -- improved electrical systems, etc. The thing is, we need a better internal combustion motor to begin with -- and that's a new-generation diesel. A Civic Hybrid seems great at 45 mpg, but a hypothetical Jetta Diesel Hybrid would probably top 60 mpg. And if you must, SUVs with 40 mpg city, 30 mpg hwy are feasible too.
Third, we need to invest in smart power grids, and distributed power systems. This would allow to hook their solar systems, windmills, natural gas microturbines and fuel cells, and even hybrid cars into the grid, with the meter able to run backward. This would encourage development of clean power systems by eliminating the barrier to becoming a producer. It would drive down costs because of increased supply, and result in a more robust system. It's more efficient because it cuts transmision losses. Distributed power is better than a centralized model in a time of crisis -- what happens if someone bombs Hoover Dam, or other regional facility? Distributed power is better for national security. All it takes is some new switching gear and a computer network to control it all -- why are we not doing this?
Finally, we need to make our whole society more efficient by reducing car-dependent real estate development. It's ridiculous that people accept 50 mile commutes as normal. People should live, work, and shop within a very few miles. Unfortunately, lack of planning or lousy planning and zoning prevents this in many American cities The real solution to oil dependence is getting people out of their cars. Much has been written on this. Do a search on "new urbanism" if you wish.
So there you go -- clean diesel, diesel hybrid cars, and distributed power; plus land use, urban planning, and transportation reform. These are the solutions we have available to us *right now.* There are no huge technical problems to overcome. Hydrogen has huge technical considerations, and even bigger socio-political-economic ones. Sweeping revolution is fun to think about, but never works out in the real world. I say we take the baby steps first.
Hydrogen power is a neat idea, but it's pie in the sky for now. The main problem is that it takes so much energy to make the hydrogen, and we're short of that already -- let alone getting it from clean sources. We can talk about converting our transportation fleets to hydrogen only after we've converted the rest of our energy needs to clean power, with a considerable surplus.
It seems to me that putting together a safe and secure mechanical locking system would not be particularly difficult for a conductive plug if one had concerns about people frying themselves.
A lot of very smart engineers have spent years working on this. It is difficult. Most importantly, it's still prone to human error. It also needs continual inspection and maintenance. So it costs as much to build and maintain as the inductive system -- which is idiot-proof, and virtually maintenance free.
Biodiesel is great and promising in many ways, but in no way is it cheaper than petro diesel -- at least for large scale commercial production. It's true that a farmer or other industrious user can make biodiesel for his own use for about a third to half the cost of petrodiesel, but this assumes he's getting used fry oil or something for free. Also, he's doing it in steel drums in his backyard, not building a plant that's efficient and safe for large scale production. Companies who have done this must charge about double the retail price of petro diesel in order to break even, and that's wholesale -- plus, that's still using free, used fry oil as a base stock. If veggie oil had to be produced for biodiesel, the cost would go up considerably. The best estimates are that commerical biodiesel would always cost at least 2-3 times as much as petro diesel. There's no getting around the fact that it's cheaper to pull oil out of the ground and use normal petro refining techniques than it is to grow crops and refine them into biodiesel.
Plus, what would happen if so much farmland were devoted to growing crops for fuel? What are the environmental ramifications of that?
There is/was a legitimate technical reason for the inductive charger. Charging the car *quickly*, as in an hour or two instead of overnight, requires tremendous current. I don't remember the amount, but it's many times more than the 15A or so that a normal consumer power cord can deliver. Such large amounts of current require special equipment, which is expensive, and still dangerous for a non-electrician to be dealing with. Since it would cost just as much as an inductive system anyway, without even considering the safety/liability issues, it makes sense to just use the inductive system.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending GM. They were definately trying to make sure they got a piece of every bit of electric car action via their inductive charging patents and such. And there's nothing wrong with a normal household power cord if you have all night to charge the car. But for those quick charge stations in public parking lots, inductive charging was really the only way to go.
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Joan Rivers' film, The Girl Most Likely To, was at one time (1970s) the most played movie on television. It hasn't appeared for many years, but it's really what made her rich. It's about a girl who was geeky and ugly and picked on in high school. As if things couldn't get any worse for her, she becomes disfigured in a terrible car wreck. But after the required plastic surgery she emerges a total hottie, and uses her looks to get revenge on every man who wronged her, by luring them to their deaths.
Another low budget wonder is Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a Russ Meyer film penned by Roger Ebert. The opening scene showing glances going around a room at a party is worth the rental, cheesy 60s film kitsch at its best.
Though big business runs on big deals, many smaller projects are actually a lot more profitable. The most profitable movies of all time, in a ROI sense, have been low budget ones. Some notable ones are Stranger than Paradise, which I've heard cost under $30k to make, another $100k to market, but has made millions since, not to mention making Screamin' Jay Hawkins' a household name (well not quite, but...). Another is Sex, Lies, and Videotape, which also cost just a few hundred thousand dollars, and has made tens of millions.
Both these films and their directors were critically acclaimed, and have been highly hyped. Many young directors have done brilliant work, but nothing gets you noticed like making money.
If this thing is really waterproof, or even highly water resistant, that would be a first, AFAIK. I've been looking for a waterproof phone for years, and I'm awfully surprised no one has offered it.
I think of all those surfers in southern CA who would love to be able to call home and ask when dinner will be ready. Sony sports phone anyone? Talk about untapped potential...
No one but a fashion fiend needs a wrist phone, but a waterproof Star-tac that fits in a pocket would be a boon to many.
Seriously, many of us who work outside are in dire need of waterproof phones. Whether it's doing a wet job or getting caught in the rain, keeping a cell phone dry is a real pain. Most of them die at the first drop of water.
...are brilliant people from Mexico, both brimming with groundbreaking ideas!
How is the coverage of the broadband service? If you pay the $99, do you get a broadband connection wherever there's digital coverage? Also, does the $99 plan require a contract, or can you do it month to month like you can with their other options? Also, if I add Canada to my national (US) plan, will it work up there?
I have Verizon but I've never gotten around to trying the regular free service. 14.4k may be slow, but it's plenty fast for email. Now that the cables are available cheap I'll have to give it a go.
SMS may be cheaper in Europe, but in the US it's the other way around. You pay 10 cents a message *extra* no matter what, while any voice call you make is usually with the already-paid-for minutes included with your plan.
So in the US, SMS is mostly a zooty novelty service for gadget freaks and people with unlimited expense accounts. In reality it adds little value but much cost, so it hasn't caught on.
...it's Microsoft's management who refuses to implement even the most basic security measures. Windows' default installations have everything but the kitchen sink up and running. Everyday programs like Outlook Express have huge security holes, and even the ones that can be plugged are wide open in the default installation. Microsoft ought to keep its mouth shut until it starts to address these very basic issues.
One of the main differences between patent courts and the rest of the court system is that patent court is not adversarial by design. When you go for a patent, you're not under such a heavy burden to prove you're worthy of it. And it's not the government's job to prove you're not, or even to put up a challenge. Other courts are adversarial by design. Each side does whatever it can to prove they're right and the other is wrong. Out of this emerges a winner and a loser. The patent system is not like that. Instead of a right and a wrong, we're left with two maybes, and potentially some new barriers to free commerce.
The USPTO measures its own net income with all the sophistication of a dot-com, focusing only on the top line--application fees.
Well, that's how every government agency works. The top line, the amount of money coming in, through fees, funding, etc., is the amount controlled by the people in charge. And in bureaucracies, that's everything -- your worth as an administrator, your salary, and your political power, is defined by how big a budget you control, and how many people you have under you. So bureaucrats do whatever they can to increase their budgets.
Charging money for individual messages is a ridiculous idea. We have other spam solutions that work very well -- smart filters. If you're a mail admin, you need to get familiar with Spamassasin and other tools like it. They work. Personally, I use PopFilter on my laptop, and it works beautifully. I get 2-300 messages a day, of which about 5% are legit. PopFilter handles this flawlessly.
Before this, HP was supposed to be offering their own Linux distribution, which seemed stupid to me. Why incur all that extra development and support cost, when you're never going to be the next Redhat anyway? Companies like HP should have been on the Linux bandwagon years ago, but they stalled only because they couldn't figure out how to stamp their own brand on it. This is asinine, but typical of corporate dinosaurs like HP. Shareholders should be very upset. It's high time HP just grabbed a good distribution and went with it.
It would be really neat if a big company standardized on Debian, but still kept its fingers out of it, in a sense of true community spirit. It's not that weird an idea.
I don't see what the big deal is. My IBM T20 gets no more than a little warm, even when doing CPU-intensive stuff.
One of the problems is this stupid race to the most megahertz. Hardly anyone needs a computer that fast, let alone a laptop. How many of you are doing 3D rendering, professional Photoshop work, or heavy duty web/database serving from your laptop? The first two practically require a CRT, the third just doesn't happen in the real world. And wanker gamers don't count...
Limewire and Kazaaa are both Java apps too, and they run fine on an old, slow box -- as long as you have enough RAM. If you're stuck with 128MB RAM and you're running Linux, just switch to a lightweight window manager like Ice and have at it.
The US is still the vanguard of research and development. Even when these things come from Japanese companies, they're most often developed in the US, by Americans.
I don't know who designs Toshiba's fuel cells specifically, or where, but almost all Toshiba's other engineering is done in Irvine, CA -- by people from all over, but usually Americans. Almost all are graduates of American univerisities, though.
The houses that have lasted a hundred years are the good ones. There were many more bad ones, virtually all of which have disappeared. The people we know as "Victorians" were the rich people of a hundred years ago, who could afford houses with lots of gingerbread, tile, fine woodwork, and other expensive, craftsmanlike touches. These people were relatively richer than the rich people of today, so the homes you're thinking about were even beyond the MTV Cribs and HG channel stuff.
Even the smaller, more low-key homes that are revered today, such as Greene and Greene's craftsmans, were premium products for the well-heeled. They've lasted so long and appear so well-made now, becuase no expense was spared back then.
Do some research into some of these old neighborhoods, and see who used to live there. It wasn't average folks, trust me.
...to the new apartment they've chewed for themselves inside your walls.
I think most of the Republican Party's core values are good, and would benefit this country, so voting Republican is a pragmatic decision to get those policies implemented. ...if they would actually implement them. That's the problem with the Republican party -- they do exactly the opposite of what they say they're going to do. They run on a platform of fiscal conservatism, but when they get there they spend us into the poorhouse. This has been true of every Republican administration of the last 30 years (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I), and now it's happening again.
The other problem is that Republicans have a "lets' starve the beast" attitude toward government, rather than the "let's manage this better" attitude that's needed. After all, some functions of government *are* necessary. This ensures that any money that is spent is just throwing good money after bad, which is worse than spending a lot but actually getting something for it.
Finally, the Republican party does not tolerate healthy debate or dissent within its ranks. Anyone who goes against party bosses' wishes is punished or marginalized. I used to be a registered Republican, until I figured out that they really are a bunch of fascists.
Liberal-conservative is a phony paradigm that defines the parameters of the debates in a rather silly fashion
I agree, it's a model that no longer resembles reality in any way. Both parties have their big spenders and tighwads, both parties have their Bible-thumpers and libertines, and both parties have their big-money "clients" (often the same ones). But as a "small-l," "social" libertarian who puts a high value on pragmatism, I find myself completely orphaned these days.
Spam is just one more area where Microsoft is neglecting their customers' needs. For all the years we've been on the internet, Microsoft has offered its users *nothing* but some rudimentary filters in Outlook Express and Outlook. As usual, this demonstrates that Microsoft *does not care* about its users.
I've used several spam filtering systems, all of which work extremely well. Right now I'm using POPFilter with Outlook Express. It works great. The one thing that would make it perfect, and I mean perfect, is an automatic whitelist of my addressbook. I haven't bothered to try to do that because I'm not a MS/Win32 or Perl programmer. But there's no reason why this code, or some Win32 implementation of it, couldn't be incorporated into Outlook Express for the benefit of Joe User -- without usability problems.
Again, these spam filters are very effective. Since Outlook Express is by far the most common mail client on the internet, building good spam filtering into it would stop most spam dead in its tracks. The only reason it flourishes is that most of it does get through, and getting it through is so easy and cheap. If this were made just a little harder, there would be a lot less incentive to try. The problem is, no one with any influence (MS and its users) is even putting up a fight.
Blame Microsoft for falling down on the job -- again.
I think you meant to say "SUVs with 30 mpg city, 40 mpg hwy are feasible too"--unless these hypothetical diesel electric engines are less efficient on the highway than in stop-and-go traffic?
Nope. A hybrid SUV could deliver 40 mpg at low speeds in stop and go traffic. But there's no getting around an SUV's barn-door aerodynamics -- it takes a lot of power to push it through the air at highway speeds. Thus the lower highway number.
Most people could probably live closer to work, or work closer to home, than they do right now, but there are tradeoffs to make, and I don't think this can be solved by planning.
Oh, yes it can, and it's being done succssfully in many places. The most successful cities are the best planned ones -- if not from the outset, then when planners are involved in redevelopment. As I said, there's plenty written on this...
Sometimes the job you want just doesn't exist near where you want to live
Why is that?
Hydrogen is pie in the sky for now.
Instead, we should concentrate on a few other things first, which are immediately achievable, and ultimately more useful, in both the short and long term.
First, we need to get the sulfur out of diesel fuel. I'm taking this first because it's a no-brainer, and the current policy is too little, much too late. US standards for diesel are lower than Europe's, which is why we can't have their terrific, new-generation diesel cars. The average small car can, and does (over there) get 40+ mpg, without hybrid technology. Look at the Jetta Diesel -- it easily beats the Civic Hybrid, with no high-tech fancy stuff. The thing is, that's not even the best of the breed. Plus, if we get the sulfur out of the diesel, we can also clean up our industrial diesel engines considerably, which are the second biggest source of pollution in many areas.
Second, we do need that high-tech fancy stuff -- hybrid cars are terrific. Designs like the Insight/Civic are simply a better way to build a car, for a variety of reasons -- improved electrical systems, etc. The thing is, we need a better internal combustion motor to begin with -- and that's a new-generation diesel. A Civic Hybrid seems great at 45 mpg, but a hypothetical Jetta Diesel Hybrid would probably top 60 mpg. And if you must, SUVs with 40 mpg city, 30 mpg hwy are feasible too.
Third, we need to invest in smart power grids, and distributed power systems. This would allow to hook their solar systems, windmills, natural gas microturbines and fuel cells, and even hybrid cars into the grid, with the meter able to run backward. This would encourage development of clean power systems by eliminating the barrier to becoming a producer. It would drive down costs because of increased supply, and result in a more robust system. It's more efficient because it cuts transmision losses. Distributed power is better than a centralized model in a time of crisis -- what happens if someone bombs Hoover Dam, or other regional facility? Distributed power is better for national security. All it takes is some new switching gear and a computer network to control it all -- why are we not doing this?
Finally, we need to make our whole society more efficient by reducing car-dependent real estate development. It's ridiculous that people accept 50 mile commutes as normal. People should live, work, and shop within a very few miles. Unfortunately, lack of planning or lousy planning and zoning prevents this in many American cities The real solution to oil dependence is getting people out of their cars. Much has been written on this. Do a search on "new urbanism" if you wish.
So there you go -- clean diesel, diesel hybrid cars, and distributed power; plus land use, urban planning, and transportation reform. These are the solutions we have available to us *right now.* There are no huge technical problems to overcome. Hydrogen has huge technical considerations, and even bigger socio-political-economic ones. Sweeping revolution is fun to think about, but never works out in the real world. I say we take the baby steps first.
Hydrogen power is a neat idea, but it's pie in the sky for now. The main problem is that it takes so much energy to make the hydrogen, and we're short of that already -- let alone getting it from clean sources. We can talk about converting our transportation fleets to hydrogen only after we've converted the rest of our energy needs to clean power, with a considerable surplus.
It seems to me that putting together a safe and secure mechanical locking system would not be particularly difficult for a conductive plug if one had concerns about people frying themselves.
A lot of very smart engineers have spent years working on this. It is difficult. Most importantly, it's still prone to human error. It also needs continual inspection and maintenance. So it costs as much to build and maintain as the inductive system -- which is idiot-proof, and virtually maintenance free.
Biodiesel is great and promising in many ways, but in no way is it cheaper than petro diesel -- at least for large scale commercial production. It's true that a farmer or other industrious user can make biodiesel for his own use for about a third to half the cost of petrodiesel, but this assumes he's getting used fry oil or something for free. Also, he's doing it in steel drums in his backyard, not building a plant that's efficient and safe for large scale production. Companies who have done this must charge about double the retail price of petro diesel in order to break even, and that's wholesale -- plus, that's still using free, used fry oil as a base stock. If veggie oil had to be produced for biodiesel, the cost would go up considerably. The best estimates are that commerical biodiesel would always cost at least 2-3 times as much as petro diesel. There's no getting around the fact that it's cheaper to pull oil out of the ground and use normal petro refining techniques than it is to grow crops and refine them into biodiesel.
Plus, what would happen if so much farmland were devoted to growing crops for fuel? What are the environmental ramifications of that?
This is all really old news -- months and months. Those interested in this stuff should read EV World.
There is/was a legitimate technical reason for the inductive charger. Charging the car *quickly*, as in an hour or two instead of overnight, requires tremendous current. I don't remember the amount, but it's many times more than the 15A or so that a normal consumer power cord can deliver. Such large amounts of current require special equipment, which is expensive, and still dangerous for a non-electrician to be dealing with. Since it would cost just as much as an inductive system anyway, without even considering the safety/liability issues, it makes sense to just use the inductive system.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending GM. They were definately trying to make sure they got a piece of every bit of electric car action via their inductive charging patents and such. And there's nothing wrong with a normal household power cord if you have all night to charge the car. But for those quick charge stations in public parking lots, inductive charging was really the only way to go.