There's nothing more annoying than a post to the effect of "Look at this - it's AWESOME!!!!" above a black box saying "This video is not available in your area".
Region locking is nothing next to all web video being locked-up in Flash format, which anyone not using Windows/Mac/Linux on x86 (or just can't subject themselves to the insecurity) is locked-out from. This even though there are many open source players that would handle the video just fine if it was simply "embed"-ed in the page, rather than using some SWF app as a front-end to everything.
I think your priorities are a bit off... There are far more important issues at hand.
DAB use MPEG-1 Layer2 audio at any bitrate. DAB is indistinguishable from CD audio at 192kbps. Admittedly, many DAB broadcasters IN THE UK use lower bitrates, but that's a simple question of how much money each broadcaster wants to spend on their digital transmissions...
terrible error correction,
See above. The level of error correction is selectable. If it's not enough, complain to the broadcaster that they need to select a higher level.
and pretty bad reception compared to FM.
I expect this is mostly related to the above. Though I will note that DAB uses a slightly higher frequency than analog FM. However, DAB+ will do the same, so there's no relevant difference there.
The rest of the world is dumping or not implementing DAB and implementing DAB+ instead.
Much of the rest of Europe is indeed broadcasting in DAB right now. The adoption rate was just so slow that after a couple decades, something better came along, and the installed base is small enough not to hold up migrating to something entirely non-compatible... Would you advise never adopting anything, and just sitting around hoping something better will come along?
And why are you complaining about DAB, and not about DVB? After all, you're stuck with MPEG-2 codecs, instead of the newer and better H.264... Shouldn't all of Europe have held-up on that one, waiting for MPEG-4?
DAB+ is a more up to date CODEC which is more efficient, better audio quality, better error correction, cheaper to transmit than DAB, etc. etc.
DAB+ uses HE-AAC, which does a better job of compressing audio to somewhat lower bitrates, without as many apparent artifacts. At high bitrates (192kbps) HE-AAC is no better than MPEG-1 Layer2. In-fact, maximum sound quality will be slightly worse (but probably not enough for the general public to care).
The error correction isn't really inherently much better, either. The only reason they changed it was because the old method that worked on CBR wouldn't work on VBR... The only reason you can say it's improved is that they require more of it, and that is only to make-up for deficiencies in HE-AAC versus MPEG-1 Layer2.
DAB+ is no cheaper to transmit than DAB. It's really the same technology on the back-end there. In fact the added ECC overhead would make it a bit more expensive. The only thing that will make it "cheaper" is the ability to use lower bitrate HE-AAC audio, and therefore smaller channels.
However, any way you look at it, you're really stuck at the same problem... Broadcasters were interested in cutting costs, so they reduced quality to just tolerable levels. Even if DAB+ was adopted in a day, what makes you think they won't do the same thing, and reduce quality to barely tolerable levels?
I don't blame you for having no clue, though. This is pretty much what happens when people get their information from heavily biased articles Wikipedia, of which the DAB article is one of the worst I've ever seen. Of course there are other interested parties who stand to make a lot of money on DAB+, who are also loudly spouting an impressive amount of misinformation, sadly much of it from within the EBU.
What the hell kind of sales pitch is "We're only a little more than twice as slow!"
It's a very good sales pitch, actually. Unlike AMD, NVidia isn't an alternative to Intel CPUs. Instead it's a complimentary technology, which adds additional cost.
So, I could buy a $500 CPU and a $500 GPU, or I could buy TWO $500 CPUs, and get most of the performance, without having to completely redesign all software to run on an GPU.
And Intel has at least one good point, in that NVidia's claims are based on pretty naive methods, and the SIMD instructions that have been added to Intel/AMD CPUs in recent years really are the same thing you get with GPU programming, just on a bit smaller scale. And if Intel could double the performance of SIMD instructions on near-future CPUs, you'd really lose the benefits of GPU programming, and the economics would take care of the rest quite simply.
No matter what, AMD really wins in this one. They're packaging CPU & GPU ever closer. It might just expand the utility of SIMD, or it might introduce a new CPU instruction set for the GPU, like the x87 FPU did before it, or it might be integrated tighter still, to the point that their CPUs might just automatically route appropriate computations to the GPU silicon, and route anything else to the traditional CPU.
Please explain how I can make those trips in an electric car.
I did, in my first post in this thread. Just one more detail that doesn't support your argument, so you want to pretend it doesn't exist.
No matter how many scenarios you come up with, you won't be able to find one where an electric car significantly slows you down, unless the driver is a robot, or otherwise wearing a diaper... 1) YOU SAVE A LOT OF TIME NOT STOPPING FOR GAS. 2) YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE TO STOP FOR OTHER REASONS.
The ability to have two drivers trade shifts to drive coast-to-coast in under 48 hours would be eliminated.
Absolutely not. LA to NY is quite doable.
Arguing that you don't have features missing because new features are added is an irrelevant distraction. Just stick to my statements if you are going to disagree with me.
I did, you complete dumb fuck. You said "How do you park on the street (no meters, no lines, just on a regular side-street in front of someone's house) and get charged?" It's not an irrelevant "new feature", it's an answer to the question YOU ASKED. Now you want to pretend I'm going off the subject, because I directly addressed your scenario, which you contrived specifically to try and make electric cars look bad. Since it went the other way on you, you want to backpedal and disown that one now...
How much would that add to a charge time of a battery pack?
YOU WEREN'T TALKING ABOUT THE CHARGING PROCESS. YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT "an onboard computer that will give you readings." Explain how "an onboard computer" would now do an "amp measure" "followed by charging it to full" after a battery swap, while you are driving... Oh, that's right, you're just backpedaling again...
. Quit pointing to people complaining about obviously missing features and claiming that they suffer some deficiency
YOU suffer a deficiency. End of story. I'm tired of trying to nail jello to the wall, as you ignore my straightforward answers as if they don't exist, and backpedal out when the facts aren't supporting your baseless assertions.
But I am sure I will get flamed saying that IT is not sexist, that there is no problem and women need to get a thicker skin. And that my friends is exactly the problem.
No, the problem is every random idiot convinced they know what the problem is, and prescribing solutions to fix it.
They don't want a reduction in features and functionality.
There is no reduction in features. YOU just keep trying to spin it that way. All the cons you list are actually pros. Complaining that you can't fuel-up in 15 minutes at a gas station misses the point, in fact the reality is that you don't ever need to stop at a gas station again. End of story. You might as well be complaining that you can't go get your smog checked in an electric car, and try to design a system that requires you to do so... It makes no sense.
Even for those who somehow like the current model... Gasoline/diesel prices are a big motivator. Add in the typical oil change, trans. fluid change, filters for both, brake pad changes, and numerous others, and an all-electric vehicle is immensely more convenient no matter how you look at it.
Prove what case? You have an onboard computer that will give you readings.
You know nothing about batteries. The only reading that is easy to perform is a quick voltage test, and that will tell you next to nothing about the health of a battery. I can give you a car battery that reads 14V, and yet will do nothing when you turn the key in the ignition.
How do you park on the street (no meters, no lines, just on a regular side-street in front of someone's house) and get charged?
Why are you driving 400 miles cross-country (about 6 hours of driving), and then parking in-front of the house of someone you don't know? Presumably you're getting food, drinks, and the use of a restroom, somewhere. Wherever that happens to be, is where you get a charge.
If you're talking about just driving across town to visit someone, then you're just making an idiot of yourself, because the range of current electric vehicles is more than enough for the daily driving of 80%+ of the population. So how do you get a charge??? You drive home, and plug-in like usual.
And it's really only right now that there aren't charging stations everywhere. Even outside of major urban areas, there are street lights and power lines everywhere, almost always run along roads. It's fairly cheap to run a line down to the street, and set up an EV charging station.
And also of note, the Leaf has a small solar panel on it, so if the sun is up at all, you'll get a bit of power just parking in the middle of nowhere. While it won't charge you up from empty in a sane amount of time, it will help extend your range a bit. Point me to any gasoline vehicle that will (slowly) drip fuel into my tank, wherever I am.
batteries haven't managed to store more than a 50th the amount of energy that's in gasoline.
That number is bullshit. Sure, the theoretical energy density in gasoline is pretty high, but you can't just drip gasoline onto the wheels and make the vehicle go...
Once you account for all the weight, cost, and repeated conversion losses with gasoline, well, it's no wonder that electric vehicles like the LEAF have about 1/3rd the range, even though the batteries contain "a 50th the amount of energy" (in theory)...
You want some bullshit numbers? Calculate feeding the atoms of the batteries into a working fusion reactor, and tell me how much "energy" you get out of them...
All that matters is range. You can get 100 mi (160 km) on a charge in a Nissan Leaf. Nothing you can say about the benefits of gasoline is going to change that simple fact. Electric vehicles are already competitive with gasoline powered cars. It's just a matter of time.
You can't charge a car fast enough to match gasoline.
Yeah, and your car can't fuel itself by grazing on the brush and weeds at the side of the road, like a horse... Cars just aren't practical. I'm sticking with my horse and buggy.
You can't charge a car fast enough to match gasoline.
You don't need to. The very existence of gas stations is a not a boon, but a drawback we've learned to live with. It's an inherent limitation of the fuel, due to the danger of fire and contamination, that we have to stop at a gas station to recharge our vehicles.
Any idiot can tell you what an electric future will look like, because it was already put in place 15 years ago in California.
#1) 99% of the time, you plug-in your electric car when you get home at night, and the next morning, it's fully charged... Dirt cheap, and extremely convenient. No more watching the fuel gauge, driving around to find a gas station, pulling in, powering down, fueling-up, and then driving a ways to get back where you were going.
#2) When you are on longer trips, you simply drive to the airport, the mall, or wherever you were going. When you get there, you park in a plain old parking space, then walk up to the device that looks like a parking meter, swipe your credit card, plug it into your vehicle, and let it charge as you go on with your life. It doesn't need to take an extra 15 minutes out of your day, just a few extra seconds here and there.
Sure, electric vehicles don't charge up as fast as is possible with gasoline, but who cares? Humans don't fuel-up as fast as cars, anyhow. While you're eating, shopping, taking a pit stop, etc., your car can be charging up, too, without you having to go out of your way, or stand around and babysit the whole time.
But, if the makers agreed on a standard tech. Standard sizes. Then you'd not do a charge. You'd do a swap. And the batteries would be conditioned, tested, and recharged with every use.
That's a horrid idea. Anyone who knows anything about batteries knows that even testing them thoroughly is very difficult. And it only takes one in a pack to kill your power source. I sure as hell wouldn't trust anyone to take my batteries and give me another set that's supposedly just as good.
Tell me, since you're swapping-out 3/4ths of your vehicle at the "gas station" now, why don't you just drop off your car, and pick up the keys to a new one, and go driving off? That's pretty close to the scenario you're describing... I'm betting next to nobody is going to buy in to that idea.
And that's not even bothering to point out the extreme difficulty in swapping all the batteries in your vehicle. There's a lot of weight, and an obscene amount of power there. The mechanical portion of it is simply going to require a forklift operator to carefully remove an ultra-massive battery tray. And the electrical connections are going to require quite a bit of time as well. So at best, you're wasting a ridiculous amount on man-hours for every battery swap. You can't just hook-up a hose and poor the battery out.
Aside from that, I don't see any way for there to be a 5 minute or less charge of a car with a 400+ mile range, like we do with gasoline.
I don't see any way for there to be an exhaust system in an electric vehicle either. Just because that's the way it's done with gasoline cars, doesn't mean it's a good thing. It's a logical fallacy, that you're trying to fit a electric peg into a gasoline hole...
And the plus of this plan, it eliminates the problem with depreciation and battery replacement people fear.
No, it doesn't. It replaces the problem of your battery capacity shrinking after several years, with the problem of your battery capacity being replaced by a defective unit 6 hours after you buy the thing, stranding you in the middle of nowhere, and necessitating a court case, with expert witnesses and lots of documentation to prove your case.
Thanks for the link. That's the cheapest I've seen 10Gbit, but that still leaves infiniband cards of the same speed at 1/5th the price.
Infiniband is also not suitable for switched IP networks
I'm listening. Infiniband switches and routers are widely available, and cheaper than their ethernet equivalents. Similarly, IPoIB has been around for quite a while. In fact Infiniband was designed with substantial similarity to IPv6 in mind, and can transport IPv6 packets natively (with a few notable restrictions). So please tell me, what is it that makes you think infiniband is not suitable?
Additionally, I should say that the "IP networks" part should be removed. Part of my idea is to get away from IP on the LAN, if possible. A better IPC method would be a boon, and is long overdue. Where it's routed out to the WAN and the cloud, it can be converted into IP. On the LAN, it could reasonably be just about anything. After all, IPX networks coexisted with IP and the like for many years.
The level of service at the post office compared to UPS and Fedex is shockingly bad. Whenever I go into a UPS store there is little to no line.
The situation around here is the opposite. While the USPS has long lines (because a larger number of people utilize them for numerous services) they normally have several people on duty to service them, and even at the worst of time, the wait time is short.
With UPS/Fedex, they have tiny offices (to service a small number of people) and one or maybe two people behind the counter, they close for a couple hours in the middle of the day, and then charge $5 to deliver a letter... I'm not exactly in awe of that kind of service and efficiency.
Fry/Leela are great because the characters are well written. Each has issues of abandonment and isolation within the greater society at large which act as a common bond.
Good or bad, that plot point was absolutely beaten to death... to the point of absurdity.
Temperature differential. Second law of thermodynamics.
In short: Dr. Sterling says, "No."
In the opposite situation to AC, I know the PDC supercomputing center in Stockholm, Sweden feeds the surplus heat from their machines into the local district heating system.
Yes, waste heat is perfect when you have free "cold". However, to get work out of heat when it's already hot out, is purely perpetual motion nonsense.
you'd be hard pressed to find a storage unit that can handle these sorts of speeds.
If it was needed "NOW" it would be getting manufactured and sold NOW. It's not. It's just now getting standardized, so the hardware can be developed, and come out at a reasonable price a few years in the future, when it will in fact be needed.
We've had 10GBit ethernet for quite some time now, and yet the cards still cost $1,000 a pop. So if you could find a use for that much speed (and many do) you might find the cost prohibitive, and would hope it had been developed a couple years earlier, so the price would have had more time to drop.
10Gbit infiniband, however, costs about 1/3rd as much, much higher speeds are available right now, and 100Gbit+ infiniband is supposedly planned for next year. So, if there's a question to be asked, it's whether ethernet is even going to be the LAN standard of the future, versus something with lower latency, processing overhead and cost.
USB3, HDMI, DVI, Ethernet, DisplayPort, FireWire, eSATA, proprietary. There should be one kind cable that can be used for all of these purposes.
HDMI/DVI/DisplayPort are for raw video data. They have NOTHING in common with the USB mouse/keyboard on your desk. It makes no sense to combine them.
There's some good reasons for the differences. For instance, even if I could hook up my internet access to the same port as my hard drives, I never would... One needs low-overhead, realtime and no security, while the other is high overhead, delays are better than realtime constraints, and needs much more security.
While you have a point about the display ports, it's far worse to have only one type available, which always sucks.
It's pretty much always better for the customer to buy stuff and pay lower monthly fees instead of the other way round.
Actually, it's better that EVERYONE ELSE BUT YOU pays HIGHER FEES. Doubly true in this case. You want the early adopters to spend through the teeth, then you can throw your frugal wallet into the ring for some nice cheap equipment everyone else has subsidized.
it gets kind of funny after awhile, to see people leading with their irrational fears and screaming out their hysterical inability to think of any opinion except in only the most the simplistic binary stereotyping of ways that their closed imperceptive minds proscribe
I have to say I find this particularly amusing to hear from you, since you just got done (what, a week ago?) berating me for pointing out that switching power plants from coal to nuclear wouldn't have a notable effect on our petroleum (note: not coal) consumption...
Sadly, there was a time when this simply meant what it says.
Why would that be sad?
Now, the guy could end up getting water-boarded at some US secret prison in a third-world country
The US has used water-boarding on perhaps a handful of senior Al Qaeda officials. And rendition only occurs when a fugitive in US custody is also wanted in a (friendly) foreign country.
The assertion that a journalist who is believed to be in possession of classified material needs to worry about even being jailed, let alone tortured, is completely baseless, and completely irrationally paranoid.
If you want decent working sound, you can use pretty much any UNIX-like system except Linux.
Well, NetBSD/OpenBSD at least still use sun audio devices (as does the overwhelming installed base of Solaris), rather than OSS. Of course it's still far better than Alsa.
but really, when it comes to the healthcare system in the usa, there's no controversy: its horribly broken, and it needs to resemble the way it is in other, saner countries in the world
While some changes are obviously needed, you vastly overstate the issue, and your prescription to fix it is nonsense.
Compared to single-payer systems with equivalent levels of care, you can say the US is about 15-20% more expensive than it needs to be (at worst). Go beyond that, and you get to health care systems which have some pretty serious trade-offs, where while some services may be widely over-provided, others that are necessary and accessible in the US are difficult or nearly impossible to get.
Single-payer systems certainly aren't the only solution, however. You could also copy models such as Kaiser Permanente, which has been studied by the NIH because of it's superior efficiencies in several areas. Just making health insurance mandatory, and offering tax credits where necessary should eliminate the biggest problems with the industry right now as well. Add in a couple regulations, like requiring routine check-ups be fully covered, and the like, and the system can be greatly improved without going to a single-payer model.
Environmentalists should love it as propane has about 99% less GWP in the case of a system leak. and no patents to bother with!
I was enthusiastic about propane as a refrigerant as well, but after a couple years of seeing automotive accidents (which breach the condesner) and random idiots trying to repair or disassemble A/C systems, I can see the wisdom in having non-flammable refrigerant as the standard.
The places that have water to spare also have humidity high enough that even this system might not do so well with its evaporative cooling,
The assertion is that this device will indeed work well in high humidity. Whether that's true or not remains to be seen, but I see no reason for you to assert it's not so.
and the places where evaporative cooling works best don't have the water to spare.
Do you have any clue how much water a swamp cooler consumes? It's not a large amount. You'd save more water getting people to shave 1min off their showers. Why do you think they use that tiny 1/4" copper tubing to supply them with water?
With a rather small portable ("shop") swamp cooler, I rigged-up a 5 gallon tank to feed it where pressurized water sources weren't handy, and found it consuming less than half a tank, while running all day. Obviously, a pair of large whole house coolers will use much more than that, but nowhere near so much that it's going to drain all the rivers...
Yes, it uses "salty water" to dehumidify the air. That certainly does not translate into being able to use salt water in the colling portion of the device.
"Guest author Steve Cheney is an entrepreneur and formerly an engineer & programmer specializing in web and mobile technologies."
"it seems like mobile devices and platforms are innovating at about five times the pace of personal computers."
"Intel's monopoly in PC processors and peripheral chipsets has caused PC innovation to stagnate."
"A great example of this is the notable lack of GPS chips in laptops." "Sure, PC makers could add a separate GPS chip to the motherboard, but why hasn't Intel"
It's called Medicare. It's a large percentage of federal spending right now, and it's projected to exceed 100% of all federal spending by about 2020, baring any changes.
If you don't know this, it's simply because you aren't informed at all. Experts have been sounding the alarm bells for at least a decade, loudly and repeatedly. It seemed to be the top topic just a handful of years ago, when ballooning medical costs were the largest problem facing the general public, just a while before the economy started to fail completely, and more immediate concerns became paramount.
Obama, Clinton, and McCain talked about it all through their presidential primaries and campaigns, in no uncertain terms. It was a major issues discussed endlessly in the house and senate for about a year as Obama tried to push health care reform through. I have no idea how you could be ignorant of this fact, if you pay attention to national/world events at all.
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Region locking is nothing next to all web video being locked-up in Flash format, which anyone not using Windows/Mac/Linux on x86 (or just can't subject themselves to the insecurity) is locked-out from. This even though there are many open source players that would handle the video just fine if it was simply "embed"-ed in the page, rather than using some SWF app as a front-end to everything.
I think your priorities are a bit off... There are far more important issues at hand.
DAB use MPEG-1 Layer2 audio at any bitrate. DAB is indistinguishable from CD audio at 192kbps. Admittedly, many DAB broadcasters IN THE UK use lower bitrates, but that's a simple question of how much money each broadcaster wants to spend on their digital transmissions...
See above. The level of error correction is selectable. If it's not enough, complain to the broadcaster that they need to select a higher level.
I expect this is mostly related to the above. Though I will note that DAB uses a slightly higher frequency than analog FM. However, DAB+ will do the same, so there's no relevant difference there.
Much of the rest of Europe is indeed broadcasting in DAB right now. The adoption rate was just so slow that after a couple decades, something better came along, and the installed base is small enough not to hold up migrating to something entirely non-compatible... Would you advise never adopting anything, and just sitting around hoping something better will come along?
And why are you complaining about DAB, and not about DVB? After all, you're stuck with MPEG-2 codecs, instead of the newer and better H.264... Shouldn't all of Europe have held-up on that one, waiting for MPEG-4?
DAB+ uses HE-AAC, which does a better job of compressing audio to somewhat lower bitrates, without as many apparent artifacts. At high bitrates (192kbps) HE-AAC is no better than MPEG-1 Layer2. In-fact, maximum sound quality will be slightly worse (but probably not enough for the general public to care).
The error correction isn't really inherently much better, either. The only reason they changed it was because the old method that worked on CBR wouldn't work on VBR... The only reason you can say it's improved is that they require more of it, and that is only to make-up for deficiencies in HE-AAC versus MPEG-1 Layer2.
DAB+ is no cheaper to transmit than DAB. It's really the same technology on the back-end there. In fact the added ECC overhead would make it a bit more expensive. The only thing that will make it "cheaper" is the ability to use lower bitrate HE-AAC audio, and therefore smaller channels.
However, any way you look at it, you're really stuck at the same problem... Broadcasters were interested in cutting costs, so they reduced quality to just tolerable levels. Even if DAB+ was adopted in a day, what makes you think they won't do the same thing, and reduce quality to barely tolerable levels?
I don't blame you for having no clue, though. This is pretty much what happens when people get their information from heavily biased articles Wikipedia, of which the DAB article is one of the worst I've ever seen. Of course there are other interested parties who stand to make a lot of money on DAB+, who are also loudly spouting an impressive amount of misinformation, sadly much of it from within the EBU.
It's a very good sales pitch, actually. Unlike AMD, NVidia isn't an alternative to Intel CPUs. Instead it's a complimentary technology, which adds additional cost.
So, I could buy a $500 CPU and a $500 GPU, or I could buy TWO $500 CPUs, and get most of the performance, without having to completely redesign all software to run on an GPU.
And Intel has at least one good point, in that NVidia's claims are based on pretty naive methods, and the SIMD instructions that have been added to Intel/AMD CPUs in recent years really are the same thing you get with GPU programming, just on a bit smaller scale. And if Intel could double the performance of SIMD instructions on near-future CPUs, you'd really lose the benefits of GPU programming, and the economics would take care of the rest quite simply.
No matter what, AMD really wins in this one. They're packaging CPU & GPU ever closer. It might just expand the utility of SIMD, or it might introduce a new CPU instruction set for the GPU, like the x87 FPU did before it, or it might be integrated tighter still, to the point that their CPUs might just automatically route appropriate computations to the GPU silicon, and route anything else to the traditional CPU.
I did, in my first post in this thread. Just one more detail that doesn't support your argument, so you want to pretend it doesn't exist.
No matter how many scenarios you come up with, you won't be able to find one where an electric car significantly slows you down, unless the driver is a robot, or otherwise wearing a diaper... 1) YOU SAVE A LOT OF TIME NOT STOPPING FOR GAS. 2) YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE TO STOP FOR OTHER REASONS.
Absolutely not. LA to NY is quite doable.
I did, you complete dumb fuck. You said "How do you park on the street (no meters, no lines, just on a regular side-street in front of someone's house) and get charged?" It's not an irrelevant "new feature", it's an answer to the question YOU ASKED. Now you want to pretend I'm going off the subject, because I directly addressed your scenario, which you contrived specifically to try and make electric cars look bad. Since it went the other way on you, you want to backpedal and disown that one now...
YOU WEREN'T TALKING ABOUT THE CHARGING PROCESS. YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT "an onboard computer that will give you readings." Explain how "an onboard computer" would now do an "amp measure" "followed by charging it to full" after a battery swap, while you are driving... Oh, that's right, you're just backpedaling again...
YOU suffer a deficiency. End of story. I'm tired of trying to nail jello to the wall, as you ignore my straightforward answers as if they don't exist, and backpedal out when the facts aren't supporting your baseless assertions.
No, the problem is every random idiot convinced they know what the problem is, and prescribing solutions to fix it.
There is no reduction in features. YOU just keep trying to spin it that way. All the cons you list are actually pros. Complaining that you can't fuel-up in 15 minutes at a gas station misses the point, in fact the reality is that you don't ever need to stop at a gas station again. End of story. You might as well be complaining that you can't go get your smog checked in an electric car, and try to design a system that requires you to do so... It makes no sense.
Even for those who somehow like the current model... Gasoline/diesel prices are a big motivator. Add in the typical oil change, trans. fluid change, filters for both, brake pad changes, and numerous others, and an all-electric vehicle is immensely more convenient no matter how you look at it.
You know nothing about batteries. The only reading that is easy to perform is a quick voltage test, and that will tell you next to nothing about the health of a battery. I can give you a car battery that reads 14V, and yet will do nothing when you turn the key in the ignition.
Why are you driving 400 miles cross-country (about 6 hours of driving), and then parking in-front of the house of someone you don't know? Presumably you're getting food, drinks, and the use of a restroom, somewhere. Wherever that happens to be, is where you get a charge.
If you're talking about just driving across town to visit someone, then you're just making an idiot of yourself, because the range of current electric vehicles is more than enough for the daily driving of 80%+ of the population. So how do you get a charge??? You drive home, and plug-in like usual.
And it's really only right now that there aren't charging stations everywhere. Even outside of major urban areas, there are street lights and power lines everywhere, almost always run along roads. It's fairly cheap to run a line down to the street, and set up an EV charging station.
And also of note, the Leaf has a small solar panel on it, so if the sun is up at all, you'll get a bit of power just parking in the middle of nowhere. While it won't charge you up from empty in a sane amount of time, it will help extend your range a bit. Point me to any gasoline vehicle that will (slowly) drip fuel into my tank, wherever I am.
That number is bullshit. Sure, the theoretical energy density in gasoline is pretty high, but you can't just drip gasoline onto the wheels and make the vehicle go...
Once you account for all the weight, cost, and repeated conversion losses with gasoline, well, it's no wonder that electric vehicles like the LEAF have about 1/3rd the range, even though the batteries contain "a 50th the amount of energy" (in theory)...
You want some bullshit numbers? Calculate feeding the atoms of the batteries into a working fusion reactor, and tell me how much "energy" you get out of them...
All that matters is range. You can get 100 mi (160 km) on a charge in a Nissan Leaf. Nothing you can say about the benefits of gasoline is going to change that simple fact. Electric vehicles are already competitive with gasoline powered cars. It's just a matter of time.
Yeah, and your car can't fuel itself by grazing on the brush and weeds at the side of the road, like a horse... Cars just aren't practical. I'm sticking with my horse and buggy.
You don't need to. The very existence of gas stations is a not a boon, but a drawback we've learned to live with. It's an inherent limitation of the fuel, due to the danger of fire and contamination, that we have to stop at a gas station to recharge our vehicles.
Any idiot can tell you what an electric future will look like, because it was already put in place 15 years ago in California.
#1) 99% of the time, you plug-in your electric car when you get home at night, and the next morning, it's fully charged... Dirt cheap, and extremely convenient. No more watching the fuel gauge, driving around to find a gas station, pulling in, powering down, fueling-up, and then driving a ways to get back where you were going.
#2) When you are on longer trips, you simply drive to the airport, the mall, or wherever you were going. When you get there, you park in a plain old parking space, then walk up to the device that looks like a parking meter, swipe your credit card, plug it into your vehicle, and let it charge as you go on with your life. It doesn't need to take an extra 15 minutes out of your day, just a few extra seconds here and there.
Sure, electric vehicles don't charge up as fast as is possible with gasoline, but who cares? Humans don't fuel-up as fast as cars, anyhow. While you're eating, shopping, taking a pit stop, etc., your car can be charging up, too, without you having to go out of your way, or stand around and babysit the whole time.
That's a horrid idea. Anyone who knows anything about batteries knows that even testing them thoroughly is very difficult. And it only takes one in a pack to kill your power source. I sure as hell wouldn't trust anyone to take my batteries and give me another set that's supposedly just as good.
Tell me, since you're swapping-out 3/4ths of your vehicle at the "gas station" now, why don't you just drop off your car, and pick up the keys to a new one, and go driving off? That's pretty close to the scenario you're describing... I'm betting next to nobody is going to buy in to that idea.
And that's not even bothering to point out the extreme difficulty in swapping all the batteries in your vehicle. There's a lot of weight, and an obscene amount of power there. The mechanical portion of it is simply going to require a forklift operator to carefully remove an ultra-massive battery tray. And the electrical connections are going to require quite a bit of time as well. So at best, you're wasting a ridiculous amount on man-hours for every battery swap. You can't just hook-up a hose and poor the battery out.
I don't see any way for there to be an exhaust system in an electric vehicle either. Just because that's the way it's done with gasoline cars, doesn't mean it's a good thing. It's a logical fallacy, that you're trying to fit a electric peg into a gasoline hole...
No, it doesn't. It replaces the problem of your battery capacity shrinking after several years, with the problem of your battery capacity being replaced by a defective unit 6 hours after you buy the thing, stranding you in the middle of nowhere, and necessitating a court case, with expert witnesses and lots of documentation to prove your case.
Thanks for the link. That's the cheapest I've seen 10Gbit, but that still leaves infiniband cards of the same speed at 1/5th the price.
I'm listening. Infiniband switches and routers are widely available, and cheaper than their ethernet equivalents. Similarly, IPoIB has been around for quite a while. In fact Infiniband was designed with substantial similarity to IPv6 in mind, and can transport IPv6 packets natively (with a few notable restrictions). So please tell me, what is it that makes you think infiniband is not suitable?
Additionally, I should say that the "IP networks" part should be removed. Part of my idea is to get away from IP on the LAN, if possible. A better IPC method would be a boon, and is long overdue. Where it's routed out to the WAN and the cloud, it can be converted into IP. On the LAN, it could reasonably be just about anything. After all, IPX networks coexisted with IP and the like for many years.
The situation around here is the opposite. While the USPS has long lines (because a larger number of people utilize them for numerous services) they normally have several people on duty to service them, and even at the worst of time, the wait time is short.
With UPS/Fedex, they have tiny offices (to service a small number of people) and one or maybe two people behind the counter, they close for a couple hours in the middle of the day, and then charge $5 to deliver a letter... I'm not exactly in awe of that kind of service and efficiency.
Good or bad, that plot point was absolutely beaten to death... to the point of absurdity.
Temperature differential. Second law of thermodynamics.
In short: Dr. Sterling says, "No."
Yes, waste heat is perfect when you have free "cold". However, to get work out of heat when it's already hot out, is purely perpetual motion nonsense.
If it was needed "NOW" it would be getting manufactured and sold NOW. It's not. It's just now getting standardized, so the hardware can be developed, and come out at a reasonable price a few years in the future, when it will in fact be needed.
We've had 10GBit ethernet for quite some time now, and yet the cards still cost $1,000 a pop. So if you could find a use for that much speed (and many do) you might find the cost prohibitive, and would hope it had been developed a couple years earlier, so the price would have had more time to drop.
10Gbit infiniband, however, costs about 1/3rd as much, much higher speeds are available right now, and 100Gbit+ infiniband is supposedly planned for next year. So, if there's a question to be asked, it's whether ethernet is even going to be the LAN standard of the future, versus something with lower latency, processing overhead and cost.
HDMI/DVI/DisplayPort are for raw video data. They have NOTHING in common with the USB mouse/keyboard on your desk. It makes no sense to combine them.
There's some good reasons for the differences. For instance, even if I could hook up my internet access to the same port as my hard drives, I never would... One needs low-overhead, realtime and no security, while the other is high overhead, delays are better than realtime constraints, and needs much more security.
While you have a point about the display ports, it's far worse to have only one type available, which always sucks.
Before Titanic, Sci-Fi was THE genre. All the highest grossing films in the past few decades were Sci-Fi. And before that, it was all westerns.
Now what's the genre? Gay vampires? Even if you think you can name one, Sci-Fi is still going to be at least #2 on any list of top genres.
Actually, it's better that EVERYONE ELSE BUT YOU pays HIGHER FEES. Doubly true in this case. You want the early adopters to spend through the teeth, then you can throw your frugal wallet into the ring for some nice cheap equipment everyone else has subsidized.
I have to say I find this particularly amusing to hear from you, since you just got done (what, a week ago?) berating me for pointing out that switching power plants from coal to nuclear wouldn't have a notable effect on our petroleum (note: not coal) consumption...
YMMV.
Why would that be sad?
The US has used water-boarding on perhaps a handful of senior Al Qaeda officials. And rendition only occurs when a fugitive in US custody is also wanted in a (friendly) foreign country.
The assertion that a journalist who is believed to be in possession of classified material needs to worry about even being jailed, let alone tortured, is completely baseless, and completely irrationally paranoid.
Well, NetBSD/OpenBSD at least still use sun audio devices (as does the overwhelming installed base of Solaris), rather than OSS. Of course it's still far better than Alsa.
While some changes are obviously needed, you vastly overstate the issue, and your prescription to fix it is nonsense.
Compared to single-payer systems with equivalent levels of care, you can say the US is about 15-20% more expensive than it needs to be (at worst). Go beyond that, and you get to health care systems which have some pretty serious trade-offs, where while some services may be widely over-provided, others that are necessary and accessible in the US are difficult or nearly impossible to get.
Single-payer systems certainly aren't the only solution, however. You could also copy models such as Kaiser Permanente, which has been studied by the NIH because of it's superior efficiencies in several areas. Just making health insurance mandatory, and offering tax credits where necessary should eliminate the biggest problems with the industry right now as well. Add in a couple regulations, like requiring routine check-ups be fully covered, and the like, and the system can be greatly improved without going to a single-payer model.
I was enthusiastic about propane as a refrigerant as well, but after a couple years of seeing automotive accidents (which breach the condesner) and random idiots trying to repair or disassemble A/C systems, I can see the wisdom in having non-flammable refrigerant as the standard.
The assertion is that this device will indeed work well in high humidity. Whether that's true or not remains to be seen, but I see no reason for you to assert it's not so.
Do you have any clue how much water a swamp cooler consumes? It's not a large amount. You'd save more water getting people to shave 1min off their showers. Why do you think they use that tiny 1/4" copper tubing to supply them with water?
With a rather small portable ("shop") swamp cooler, I rigged-up a 5 gallon tank to feed it where pressurized water sources weren't handy, and found it consuming less than half a tank, while running all day. Obviously, a pair of large whole house coolers will use much more than that, but nowhere near so much that it's going to drain all the rivers...
Yes, it uses "salty water" to dehumidify the air. That certainly does not translate into being able to use salt water in the colling portion of the device.
Everything you need to know from TFA...
"Guest author Steve Cheney is an entrepreneur and formerly an engineer & programmer specializing in web and mobile technologies."
"it seems like mobile devices and platforms are innovating at about five times the pace of personal computers."
"Intel's monopoly in PC processors and peripheral chipsets has caused PC innovation to stagnate."
"A great example of this is the notable lack of GPS chips in laptops."
"Sure, PC makers could add a separate GPS chip to the motherboard, but why hasn't Intel"
It's called Medicare. It's a large percentage of federal spending right now, and it's projected to exceed 100% of all federal spending by about 2020, baring any changes.
If you don't know this, it's simply because you aren't informed at all. Experts have been sounding the alarm bells for at least a decade, loudly and repeatedly. It seemed to be the top topic just a handful of years ago, when ballooning medical costs were the largest problem facing the general public, just a while before the economy started to fail completely, and more immediate concerns became paramount.
Obama, Clinton, and McCain talked about it all through their presidential primaries and campaigns, in no uncertain terms. It was a major issues discussed endlessly in the house and senate for about a year as Obama tried to push health care reform through. I have no idea how you could be ignorant of this fact, if you pay attention to national/world events at all.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theworldnewser/2009/12/president-obama-federal-government-will-go-bankrupt-if-health-care-costs-are-not-reigned-in.html