In the former case, you are getting 8 MPG for that brief time,
That is a reasonable figure as the minimum. But that is heavily into lead-foot territory, so most people shouldn't see that. Perhaps that applies to the parent, but I generally assume that not to be the case.
I realize ancestor wasn't talking about a Prius, but something approaching this ratio probably applies to a wide range of cars.
First, with a 20MPG top figure, we're obviously talking about a V6, not a 4cyl like a Prius. The larger the engine, the less pronounced the difference should be between rolling and accelerating.
The parent also wasn't talking about _cars_. The Astro is a van, which suggests much higher aerodynamic drag at speed, making acceleration even less of an exaggerated drop in fuel efficiency.
but you haven't given any facts to support your belief.
Nor do I intend to. I'm not trying to convince anyone, and it's decidedly not the subject at hand. I was just offering a simple warning that certain figures should not just be taken at face value. The fuel mileage figures the parent gave weren't overwhelmingly wrong, of course, but they do seem unlikely enough. And more importantly, I've had numerous discussions with many other people, where the figures given were much, much further off, which is ample reason to at least distrust MPG meters. Usually, the acceleration MPG figures will be about the same, even across vastly different vehicles, which they obviously should not be.
If you'd really like to check out the subject, I'm certain there is ample info online. I'm absolutely not interested in doing the research for you, just to prove my point, on an issue that really doesn't matter, and holds no additional interest for me.
I think it's because the comment was stupid, uninformed and disproved by personal experience
Yeah. Except of course for the fact that I'm 100% correct, more knowledgeable about the issue than practically anyone, and your "personal experience" is an utterly different subject than the topic at-hand.
If you had spent 10 seconds looking at other comments in the thread, before spouting-off like the dozen of other idiots before you, you'd see why you're so completely wrong, on every level.
Really a stance I have a very hard time understanding, very hard time...
You suffer from a lack of imagination.
(Oh, yes, the web should be for pure information only, text only, forget images even... why would I ever want to see those horrible flash ads, it's wasting all my bandwidth etc. etc. I just don't see it holding water in this day and age of broadband connections, but each to their own).
I have browser plugins to handle every (OTHER) video format that is used by anyone, anywhere. Open source programs, however, don't really work with Flash, because the format is largely proprietary, and it's not actually a video format. Flash videos are almost never embedded directly, but instead have the video launched by a Flash (animation) program, making it extremely difficult to access without a full-fledged flash implementation. It's really a disgusting mess. A bit like using a power point presentation, with an embedded video, as a video format on the web.
Flash is highly vulnerable. There have been numerous published exploits for it in the recent past, and yet it still took months before a newer release was available on the most popular platforms. Meanwhile, less popular platforms like Linux were left with only a very out-dated and vulnerable versions of the plugin for YEARS.
The performance of the plugin is abhorrent. Even if you've got a top-of-the-line computer, you can expect each web page you load to freeze up and be utterly unusable for a few seconds, as the plugin loads and starts rendering. Never mind what high-speed Flash animations do once you have the page loaded. I've heard plenty of people saying Flash video sites like youtube cause their 3+GHz CPUs to peg at 100%, merely to play postage-stamp sized videos.
In more general terms, the web is a markup format, to be displayed as desired by the client. I can select the colors, font faces and sizes, and any of thousands of other options. Flash, however, is either installed, or not, and if it is, you have NO control over it at all.
I don't really object to ads, what I object to is annoyances... That includes numerous things unrelated to advertisement, like the <BLINK> tag, javascript pop-up windows, animated GIFs, etc. If I couldn't selectively disable those annoyances, I'd get rid of those features all together. See: Flash.
You aren't entirely wrong about me, though. I certainly would like to see sites less cramped (less wasted space, things like/.'s sidebar are utterly worthless for anything, but use 1/3rd of the available screen space), and with a more consistent interface, so you don't have to learn a new, completely insane system every 10 seconds, to find some trivial bit of info on a random site. If the only way to accomplish that was to eliminate the majority of graphical content and anything other than basic formatting, I would be perfectly happy with that restriction.
And bandwidth certainly isn't free. Even if I have a lot of something, doesn't mean I want to waste it all on pointless and annoying crap like overzealous ads. Many DSL options are still rather slow, like SBC/AT&T's 256K plan. Hell, my old cable modem was only 384k.
Here's the transcript of said flash presentation, I think you'll find the numbers are much larger than my just 'millions upon millions' statement
There is absolutely no information in that transcript AT ALL, except for the fact that we spend more money on the military than Russia or China. That doesn't lend ANY support to ANY of his claims at all, however. It's a completely fact-free, pointless, inane rant, that doesn't even make any specific claims.
All he claims is that military spending is bad, and if we stopped, it would solve all of our social problems. Don't bother to back that up with anything, of course.
who ever heard of a Hummer lasting 300K miles? or any general motors product for that matter.
It has been an unbelievably successful marketing campaign by Japanese companies like Honda a Toyota that managed to convince so many people that American cars are utter crap, and Japanese cars are perfect.
People who then bought Japanese cars thought they were better, not because they are, but because the only American car they had to compare it with was their 20 year-old junker.
Comparable American cars have more than kept-pace with Japanese cars in fuel efficiency and reliability. GM in particular has very good engineers, and even the lowest-end vehicle is mechanically nearly as good as their highest-end vehicles.
you can lose access to all the data on the DVD. Which is something I experienced already, so don't tell me it's impossible,
You are a single random idiot, who has no idea what he is doing. That is nothing like the scenario we are talking about. I explicitly explained that surface scratches can be repaired. You, no doubt, did not attempt to repair anything, or at least had no skill, tools, or knowledge to use.
Of course not. I avoid Flash like the plague. I do not have, do not want, nor would I accept it being installed on any of my systems.
millions upon millions of dollars are wasted just keeping nuclear missiles ready to be able to be launched, even though the number of said nuclear missiles is far over what is reasonably required to defend the US from any invader.
First, "millions" is a tiny amount, when spread over the entire country. In 2005, there was approx 50 million K-12 students currently in the US.
What's more, of course only a fraction of those "millions" could even potentially be diverted from the military to begin with. And even I'm not willing to concede that point, until I see some real figures on the program. Even if true, and even if there are more programs that are similarly wasteful (there probably aren't), that's still the smallest percentage of the overall military budget, and may only be equivalent to giving each school-aged child $2 more each year.
They're probably pretty accurate at a narrow range of operating conditions, but I don't believe for a second they're accurate at measuring fuel consumption during acceleration.
It may be a timing issue, where they're measuring the higher fuel consumption before it measures the newly-increased speed. Or any of hundreds of other possibilities. The numbers, however, certainly don't make sense.
But even if they're inconsistently off by 10%
I don't believe they're off by 10%. Fuel consumption numbers for acceleration (not just the ones you supplied BTW) appear to potentially be up to 200% off.
it takes vastly more energy per mile to accelerate.
It definitely takes more energy to accelerate. However, it really shouldn't be 10X higher fuel consumption.
The problem really depends on the length of time that you are to keep the object moving.
It's absolutely nonsensical to make a comparison between two objects, for uneven lengths of time.
Giving an object kinetic energy is a one time deal. Fighting air resistance is a continuous process,
"Giving an object kinetic energy" includes fighting air resistance, and maintaining that kinetic energy for as long as the object you're comparing it with the other object.
Even the most aerodynamic object will lose more energy to air resistance than to acceleration if it continues at the steady speed long enough.
And I'll out-live every life form on Earth, if you measure my health for an hour, and all other lifeforms for the next 10 trillion years...
we don't know how long we're talking about keeping it running.
I think it's safe to assume an equal period of time for both.
I can tell you that when I watch the little fuel economy gauge in my lady's chevy astro, accelerating I get about 4-7 MPG, and cruising I get about 23 MPG
But I'm an engineering major, and I can tell you that that's only the case if you ignore air resistance.
You must not be a very good one.
I mean, it's technically possible, but you'll have to have just about the lightest, yet most aerodynamically poor object ever built in the history of mankind...
Re:because all energy has the same environmental c
on
Hummer Greener Than Prius?
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
this article is only useful for raising questions
Yeah, what a horrible thing that would be if that happened...
You are acting like he was recommending environmental types buy Hummers. In fact, he recommended people buy a Scion or an Aveo in place of a Prius.
and making people who own Hummers feel good about themselves.
I don't think they really need any help in that department...
In other words, you might be able to shame most of the people all of the time, but you can't shame all of the people, all of the time.
I certainly agree with his conclusion. It's a very important issue across the board (not just cars) that is far too often ignored.
The one thing I'd question, is the lifetime of the vehicles. The Hummer is rated at a 3X longer life than the Prius. If those number happen to be wrong, or otherwise mismatched, the outcome of the comparison between the Hummer and Prius will be different, and the Prius could come out slightly ahead.
Of course, even in that case, fuel-efficient conventional (non-hybrid) cars still come out way ahead of an over-priced, terribly complex hybrid, by a big margin.
Cheap speakers, however, usually have limited range, and significant distortion on their own, making it harder to hear smaller details, and masking distortion from the sound card, with it's own distortion.
Of course you know the data is stored on the label side.
You're thinking of CDs. DVDs have the data layer sandwiched in-between two layers of plastic.
Even the cheapest DVD-Rs I've seen don't put it on the surface, but it's entirely possible there are some out there I'm unaware of. In any case, you're aren't just going to buy the cheapest DVD-Rs at your local store for your corporate backups, any more than you would do the same for tapes.
- No way to lose the software/format that the file is stored in
Very little benefit to that. It's much more hassle to access/use the data in the short-term. In the long-term, it's pretty hard to imagine something like RTF/HTML ever becoming unreadable.
- Easy to verify the data is retained - can you look at a DVD/tape and tell instantly if you can read the data?
I can verify digital data is 100% readable in the tiniest fraction of the time it would take you to ensure thousands of pages of paper are even slightly readable, never mind checking every letter...
- Shelf life of centuries
You may be thinking of parchment, but certainly not paper. Your laser printer paper isn't going to make it for decades, let alone centuries.
It takes effort to destroy paper copies of things. You have to really work at it.
No you don't. SOMEONE needs to put effort into it, just like the computer is putting effort into deleting all your files.
There have been an inconceivable number of times that two boxes of papers got mixed-up, and the important one got shredded. Sure the janitor put lots of "work" and "effort" into it, but for management, it was a mere typo on an order, mix-up of two label, cards, etc.
you _can_ render the data on a DVD unreadable/unaccessible because of a scratch.
No, you _CANT_.
For that, this "scratch" has to be a massive gash, which goes more than halfway through the depth of the plastic disc. Additionally, it has to span the entire radius of the disk just to make it "difficult" to recover a significant portion of the data.
Their decay increases greatly at increased temperatures and, expecially, under UV from the sun.
Your backup solution should NOT involve throwing a bunch of bare DVD-Rs on the dash board of your car.
Any backup solution involves climate control, and light-proof packaging. Your tapes would crumble in no time, otherwise.
I can put a box-worth (or two) of tape data on a single external HD
Well then your company is simply using an extremely small/old tape format. You would have the exact same problem if your company stuck with hundreds of 20GB HDDs.
and take it to our companies safe-deposit box.
This part about you doing labor for free is what makes the numbers work out. No doubt you could load up boxes of backup tapes in your car/truck, and drive it to the current storage facility as well, and save some money.
the safe-deposit box is like $100/year.
Last I checked, safe deposit boxes aren't guaranteed to maintain stable temperature, humidity, etc.
And once you are doing this in full rotation, buying lots of hard drives, getting a larger safe deposit box, etc., the price is going to get quite steep.
Onboard audio has long been sufficient for games/mp3s,
No, it hasn't. Most chipsets still sound unbelievably crappy, even with cheap speakers.
and anyone who is serious about audio for recording/mixing/audiophile/etc, is not going to bother with what Creative offers. They are the Monster Cable of the sound card market.
It's ironic. The fact that you think Creative is the Monster Cable of soundcards suggests YOU (ironically) "exclusively patronize Best Buy."
You can find Audigys for $30, and SB Live!s for $15. Sure, Best Buy sells them for $200 with a bunch of "pro" audio software when they brand new, but that's not what they really cost to halfway intelligent consumers, and OEMs alike.
I'd say, from the moment the "SB Live! Value" card came out (about 5 years ago?), the competition was dead. Now the dull-sounding and feature-bare (but better-than-onboard) $20 sound cards from other companies are practically gone.
Integration is, without a doubt, the next step. With smaller form-factors, SPDIF digital outputs on even dirt-cheap onboard audio, and the like, PCI audio is sure to go away soon enough. If companies like VIA/SIS/etc. could inexpensively make sound chips that weren't crap, it would already have happened.
you end up with a society that is addicted to subsidizes. The downside, just like any other addiction, is that you end up having to increase the subsidizes to keep the machine rolling.
That's simply not true. Subsidies can cause somewhat of a minor economic dependency in certain cases, but it's just as easy to break as any other. The free market certainly isn't a more stable/reliable alternative.
Providing subsidies for bad business plans is bad business. Corn based ethanol is a bad business plan, and the government shouldn't be propping it up.
Subsidies are much more general than that, and rarely prop-up "bad business plans".
Corn ethanol isn't ideal, but I wouldn't call it a bad business plan either. More importantly, short-term subsidies often help something to become economic, and able to withstand free-market pressures later. When the demand for (corn) ethanol is in-place, any other company can come along supplying soy ethanol, and have less difficulty entering the market than they would if they had to convince people of the benefits of even using ethanol in the first place.
Ethanol is going to be a big switch. Car manufacturers aren't going to change until it's everywhere. And it's certainly easier to get large quantities of ethanol from volumes of existing crops, rather than waiting for large numbers of farmers to switch their crops.
There are pros and cons, but I'd say it's for the better in the near-term, and perhaps 50/50 if it continues into the far-term.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a reasonable figure as the minimum. But that is heavily into lead-foot territory, so most people shouldn't see that. Perhaps that applies to the parent, but I generally assume that not to be the case.
First, with a 20MPG top figure, we're obviously talking about a V6, not a 4cyl like a Prius. The larger the engine, the less pronounced the difference should be between rolling and accelerating.
The parent also wasn't talking about _cars_. The Astro is a van, which suggests much higher aerodynamic drag at speed, making acceleration even less of an exaggerated drop in fuel efficiency.
Nor do I intend to. I'm not trying to convince anyone, and it's decidedly not the subject at hand. I was just offering a simple warning that certain figures should not just be taken at face value. The fuel mileage figures the parent gave weren't overwhelmingly wrong, of course, but they do seem unlikely enough. And more importantly, I've had numerous discussions with many other people, where the figures given were much, much further off, which is ample reason to at least distrust MPG meters. Usually, the acceleration MPG figures will be about the same, even across vastly different vehicles, which they obviously should not be.
If you'd really like to check out the subject, I'm certain there is ample info online. I'm absolutely not interested in doing the research for you, just to prove my point, on an issue that really doesn't matter, and holds no additional interest for me.
Yeah. Except of course for the fact that I'm 100% correct, more knowledgeable about the issue than practically anyone, and your "personal experience" is an utterly different subject than the topic at-hand.
If you had spent 10 seconds looking at other comments in the thread, before spouting-off like the dozen of other idiots before you, you'd see why you're so completely wrong, on every level.
You suffer from a lack of imagination.
I have browser plugins to handle every (OTHER) video format that is used by anyone, anywhere. Open source programs, however, don't really work with Flash, because the format is largely proprietary, and it's not actually a video format. Flash videos are almost never embedded directly, but instead have the video launched by a Flash (animation) program, making it extremely difficult to access without a full-fledged flash implementation. It's really a disgusting mess. A bit like using a power point presentation, with an embedded video, as a video format on the web.
Flash is highly vulnerable. There have been numerous published exploits for it in the recent past, and yet it still took months before a newer release was available on the most popular platforms. Meanwhile, less popular platforms like Linux were left with only a very out-dated and vulnerable versions of the plugin for YEARS.
The performance of the plugin is abhorrent. Even if you've got a top-of-the-line computer, you can expect each web page you load to freeze up and be utterly unusable for a few seconds, as the plugin loads and starts rendering. Never mind what high-speed Flash animations do once you have the page loaded. I've heard plenty of people saying Flash video sites like youtube cause their 3+GHz CPUs to peg at 100%, merely to play postage-stamp sized videos.
In more general terms, the web is a markup format, to be displayed as desired by the client. I can select the colors, font faces and sizes, and any of thousands of other options. Flash, however, is either installed, or not, and if it is, you have NO control over it at all.
I don't really object to ads, what I object to is annoyances... That includes numerous things unrelated to advertisement, like the <BLINK> tag, javascript pop-up windows, animated GIFs, etc. If I couldn't selectively disable those annoyances, I'd get rid of those features all together. See: Flash.
You aren't entirely wrong about me, though. I certainly would like to see sites less cramped (less wasted space, things like
And bandwidth certainly isn't free. Even if I have a lot of something, doesn't mean I want to waste it all on pointless and annoying crap like overzealous ads. Many DSL options are still rather slow, like SBC/AT&T's 256K plan. Hell, my old cable modem was only 384k.
There is absolutely no information in that transcript AT ALL, except for the fact that we spend more money on the military than Russia or China. That doesn't lend ANY support to ANY of his claims at all, however. It's a completely fact-free, pointless, inane rant, that doesn't even make any specific claims.
All he claims is that military spending is bad, and if we stopped, it would solve all of our social problems. Don't bother to back that up with anything, of course.
What was the point?
Why do my comments always bring out all the idiots, who don't bother to read (or understand) my previous comments in the same thread?
It has been an unbelievably successful marketing campaign by Japanese companies like Honda a Toyota that managed to convince so many people that American cars are utter crap, and Japanese cars are perfect.
People who then bought Japanese cars thought they were better, not because they are, but because the only American car they had to compare it with was their 20 year-old junker.
Comparable American cars have more than kept-pace with Japanese cars in fuel efficiency and reliability. GM in particular has very good engineers, and even the lowest-end vehicle is mechanically nearly as good as their highest-end vehicles.
Now THAT is utterly unfair. Honda's hybrids are much simpler, and less expensive. They are nowhere near the complexity of a Prius.
The "cost" were just the figures used for comparison. The same would be true if you counted "hydrocarbons" or any other type of pollution.
It's ironic for you to say that, since you're clearly the one who doesn't understand, and wants to baselessly dismiss it's valid points.
You are a single random idiot, who has no idea what he is doing. That is nothing like the scenario we are talking about. I explicitly explained that surface scratches can be repaired. You, no doubt, did not attempt to repair anything, or at least had no skill, tools, or knowledge to use.
Of course not. I avoid Flash like the plague. I do not have, do not want, nor would I accept it being installed on any of my systems.
First, "millions" is a tiny amount, when spread over the entire country. In 2005, there was approx 50 million K-12 students currently in the US.
What's more, of course only a fraction of those "millions" could even potentially be diverted from the military to begin with. And even I'm not willing to concede that point, until I see some real figures on the program. Even if true, and even if there are more programs that are similarly wasteful (there probably aren't), that's still the smallest percentage of the overall military budget, and may only be equivalent to giving each school-aged child $2 more each year.
They're probably pretty accurate at a narrow range of operating conditions, but I don't believe for a second they're accurate at measuring fuel consumption during acceleration.
It may be a timing issue, where they're measuring the higher fuel consumption before it measures the newly-increased speed. Or any of hundreds of other possibilities. The numbers, however, certainly don't make sense.
I don't believe they're off by 10%. Fuel consumption numbers for acceleration (not just the ones you supplied BTW) appear to potentially be up to 200% off.
It definitely takes more energy to accelerate. However, it really shouldn't be 10X higher fuel consumption.
It's absolutely nonsensical to make a comparison between two objects, for uneven lengths of time.
"Giving an object kinetic energy" includes fighting air resistance, and maintaining that kinetic energy for as long as the object you're comparing it with the other object.
And I'll out-live every life form on Earth, if you measure my health for an hour, and all other lifeforms for the next 10 trillion years...
I think it's safe to assume an equal period of time for both.
Those fuel meters are simply not to be trusted.
CD != DVD. The two are very different. You've clearly never tried the scenario you've described, or you'd know how completely wrong you are.
You must not be a very good one.
I mean, it's technically possible, but you'll have to have just about the lightest, yet most aerodynamically poor object ever built in the history of mankind...
Yeah, what a horrible thing that would be if that happened...
You are acting like he was recommending environmental types buy Hummers. In fact, he recommended people buy a Scion or an Aveo in place of a Prius.
I don't think they really need any help in that department...
In other words, you might be able to shame most of the people all of the time, but you can't shame all of the people, all of the time.
I certainly agree with his conclusion. It's a very important issue across the board (not just cars) that is far too often ignored.
The one thing I'd question, is the lifetime of the vehicles. The Hummer is rated at a 3X longer life than the Prius. If those number happen to be wrong, or otherwise mismatched, the outcome of the comparison between the Hummer and Prius will be different, and the Prius could come out slightly ahead.
Of course, even in that case, fuel-efficient conventional (non-hybrid) cars still come out way ahead of an over-priced, terribly complex hybrid, by a big margin.
Bullshit. DVDs have the reflective data layer in the the middle of 2 plastic layers. THEY ARE NOT CDs.
Well it certainly won't make it sound better!
Cheap speakers, however, usually have limited range, and significant distortion on their own, making it harder to hear smaller details, and masking distortion from the sound card, with it's own distortion.
You're thinking of CDs. DVDs have the data layer sandwiched in-between two layers of plastic.
Even the cheapest DVD-Rs I've seen don't put it on the surface, but it's entirely possible there are some out there I'm unaware of. In any case, you're aren't just going to buy the cheapest DVD-Rs at your local store for your corporate backups, any more than you would do the same for tapes.
Very little benefit to that. It's much more hassle to access/use the data in the short-term. In the long-term, it's pretty hard to imagine something like RTF/HTML ever becoming unreadable.
I can verify digital data is 100% readable in the tiniest fraction of the time it would take you to ensure thousands of pages of paper are even slightly readable, never mind checking every letter...
You may be thinking of parchment, but certainly not paper. Your laser printer paper isn't going to make it for decades, let alone centuries.
No you don't. SOMEONE needs to put effort into it, just like the computer is putting effort into deleting all your files.
There have been an inconceivable number of times that two boxes of papers got mixed-up, and the important one got shredded. Sure the janitor put lots of "work" and "effort" into it, but for management, it was a mere typo on an order, mix-up of two label, cards, etc.
The problem isn't digital.
No, you _CANT_.
For that, this "scratch" has to be a massive gash, which goes more than halfway through the depth of the plastic disc. Additionally, it has to span the entire radius of the disk just to make it "difficult" to recover a significant portion of the data.
Your backup solution should NOT involve throwing a bunch of bare DVD-Rs on the dash board of your car.
Any backup solution involves climate control, and light-proof packaging. Your tapes would crumble in no time, otherwise.
Well then your company is simply using an extremely small/old tape format. You would have the exact same problem if your company stuck with hundreds of 20GB HDDs.
This part about you doing labor for free is what makes the numbers work out. No doubt you could load up boxes of backup tapes in your car/truck, and drive it to the current storage facility as well, and save some money.
Last I checked, safe deposit boxes aren't guaranteed to maintain stable temperature, humidity, etc.
And once you are doing this in full rotation, buying lots of hard drives, getting a larger safe deposit box, etc., the price is going to get quite steep.
Linux/BSD has no problem with Sound Blaster Live cards, and at this point, they're $15 a piece.
What has Audigy got that I would want to pay more for?
No, it hasn't. Most chipsets still sound unbelievably crappy, even with cheap speakers.
It's ironic. The fact that you think Creative is the Monster Cable of soundcards suggests YOU (ironically) "exclusively patronize Best Buy."
You can find Audigys for $30, and SB Live!s for $15. Sure, Best Buy sells them for $200 with a bunch of "pro" audio software when they brand new, but that's not what they really cost to halfway intelligent consumers, and OEMs alike.
I'd say, from the moment the "SB Live! Value" card came out (about 5 years ago?), the competition was dead. Now the dull-sounding and feature-bare (but better-than-onboard) $20 sound cards from other companies are practically gone.
Integration is, without a doubt, the next step. With smaller form-factors, SPDIF digital outputs on even dirt-cheap onboard audio, and the like, PCI audio is sure to go away soon enough. If companies like VIA/SIS/etc. could inexpensively make sound chips that weren't crap, it would already have happened.
That's simply not true. Subsidies can cause somewhat of a minor economic dependency in certain cases, but it's just as easy to break as any other. The free market certainly isn't a more stable/reliable alternative.
Subsidies are much more general than that, and rarely prop-up "bad business plans".
Corn ethanol isn't ideal, but I wouldn't call it a bad business plan either. More importantly, short-term subsidies often help something to become economic, and able to withstand free-market pressures later. When the demand for (corn) ethanol is in-place, any other company can come along supplying soy ethanol, and have less difficulty entering the market than they would if they had to convince people of the benefits of even using ethanol in the first place.
Ethanol is going to be a big switch. Car manufacturers aren't going to change until it's everywhere. And it's certainly easier to get large quantities of ethanol from volumes of existing crops, rather than waiting for large numbers of farmers to switch their crops.
There are pros and cons, but I'd say it's for the better in the near-term, and perhaps 50/50 if it continues into the far-term.