I've read that many VCR's, DVD's, etc. use as much electricity when "off" as they do when in use, with the difference being as little as the amount of electricity used by the electric motors actually used to spin the DVD or move the tape.
That's not USUALLY the case. The culprits tend to be the ultra-cheap Chinese brands like "Apex", which I've wrestled with many times.
IMHO, the problem is much more than just the power draw... In an enclosed A/V cabinet, those devices will heat up an enclosed space even while off, and the both the extra heat as well as the heavier use of the power supply, will vastly shorten the life-span of the units.
You can keep your 20 year-old VCR. My 4 year-old Hauppuage MPEG capture card also records anything you throw at it (ignores macrovision), and it does so in (slightly) higher quality than DVDs, without aty defects of analog, without needing to buy tapes, rewind, etc.
The PVR-150 is down to about $60 online, putting it only slightly higher than non-MPEG capture cards, making even old slow systems perfectly capable of capturing. Of course, you can get slightly higher quality with software encoding from a non-MPEG/MJPG capture card, but most people prefer the much lower system requirements of direct hardware MPEG captures.
WP is defined as an incendiary (further defined as a flame material, section II).
Unlike napalm, which can only be used as an incidiary device, the way in which WP is used will change what type of weapon it is.
Upon exposure to atmospheric moisture, it becomes phosphoric acid. If that is only an incidental consequence, it's being used as an incidiary device. If using the acidic chemical properties against personel is intended, then it is being used as a chemical weapon.
Classification is a bit subjective, I must admit, but most agree it counts as a chemical weapon. Saying it's purely an incindiary weapon is patently false.
He's not failing to grasp a simple fact.
Yes, he is. He can't tell the difference between an exposive device, and a chemical device.
Breathing a particle or two will not burn your lungs from the inside out. Inhaling a large amount can potentially do that, but it's a solid that doesn't exist after being released long enough for that to readily happen.
You're right that I exaggerated that point somewhat, but it's still requires a fairly small ammount to cause extreme pain and death, due to inhalation. And contrary to your statement, it does remain in concentrated and toxic form more than long enough to cause death to anyone in the near vicinity.
It does not magically burn its way up your arm, either. It produces burns where it contacts but has no way of spreading beyond the initial bursting charge.
It will burn until it hits a dense solid like bone. Of course it depends how the particles contact your skin, but it certainly can burn it's way up your arm. Saying it cannot is totally incorrect.
Some ways of dying suck a lot more than others, some to the point that their use raises additional ethical questions,
That is an understatement.
Re:More conspiracy theories
on
HAARP Amping It Up
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
As I've said before, all explosives are chemicals. So are they chemical weapons? No. And neither is WP.
This is just braindead reasoning. Bombs kill people by their explosive force. When you are downwind of an exploded bomb, the smoke might not be plesant, but breathing a particle or two won't cause your body to be burned from the inside out, starting with your lungs. Getting hit in the arm by a bullet will be immensely painful, but it won't be anywhere near the agonizing pain caused by WP, and bullets won't continue to slowly burn their way up your arm.
WP is DEFINED as a chemical weapon, because it IS a chemical weapon. End of story. If you still can't grasp that simple fact, that's your problem.
You think being in front of one of those is more or less preferable to WP? It's ALL bad.
Would you rather be killed by a firing squad, a large bomb, or by being slowly burned to death? Or more accurately, being burned to death from inside, out, starting with your lungs?
Blaming the troops for employing weapons and tactics that they're trained with is the worst kind of stupid.
Why when the cable boxes that come from the cable company have 2 tuners built in.
It's called CONTEXT...
Your question (to which I was replying), was clearly about a box with a SINGLE TUNER. Obviously, if that's not the case, then that advice doesn't apply.
Cause what you suggested is the equivelent of plugging the cable box into a vcr.
Not even close. VCRs have no smarts at all. Computers can be hooked-up to IR transmitters and the like to control everything themselves.
Change the channel on the cable box while its recording and you change what you are recording.
Get an extra cable box, dedicate it to your PVR. You're going to be paying just as much (more) of an extra fee to get a smart card for this Microsoft box, as you would for an extra digital cable box from your provider.
But I'm not giving them my email address even before I know if there is a linux version.
Then don't give them your e-mail address. You aren't under oath to give them a valid address.
Have you been on the internet for more than a week? Arbitrary word@word.com e-mail addresses work find for 99.99% of web forms.
It's completely idiotic that sites insist on having something in the e-mail field, but it's only invading your privacy if you willingly offer up your private info to them.
Why not just plug a firewire cable from your cable box to your PC? No Microsoft DRM to contend with. No need to turn your nice flexible DVR into a restricted cable-box. No need to pay for more junk.
Someone want to tell me why anyone should be interested in this?
I favor the boycott approach to both formats for now.
Why? You haven't given any reasons.
There are several formats that can be used to create HD content on existing DVD disks. Windows HiDef Media
T2 Extreme uses this. It's unfortunately quite grainy, and more importantly, the DRM is worse than anything else out there.
Divx
Nice, but like WMV9, you're going to have a difficult time fitting 1080 content on a 9GB DVD at decent quality.
Quicktime (via h.264/mpeg4) H.264 (mpeg4)
Well now you're just repeating yourself...
H.264 is the future of HD broadcast and you can fit an entire 2 hour HD (720p or 1080i/p) movie on existing DVD disks with room to spare
Quality is always a big question. Some material that compresses particularly well will look fine in high-def with H.264 on a 9GB DVD. Unfortunately, not all will.
Film has a LOT of noise, and noise is one of the very hardest things for a digital codec to compress.
I think DVDs have pretty well proven that none of the professionals can do a decent job of mastering any lossy codecs like MPEG-2. The more excess space they have on the media, the less their incompotence will matter, and the better 2rd generation copies (DVD rips) done by skilled individuals will look.
JVC already has a player out that plays all these formats
I didn't see h.264 in any of their specs. You have the choice of MPEG-2, Divx (MPEG-4), and WMV9. MPEG-2 is just like current DVDs, so don't expect highdef. MPEG-4 and WMV9 are about on-par, IMHO. They can both do HighDef, provided you have some strong denoising before encoding, allow infrequent keyframes, etc., but neither will be all that impressive.
We should simply bypass Sony and Toshiba and finally use our PCs and home theater servers the way we want to.
I do, and I plan to in the future. But higher capacity discs will help in that process, immensely. Should we also bypass those that gave us DVDs, and stick to CDs? Or should we also bypass those who gave us CDs and stick to floppy disks?
And it would all be legal.
Not unless you've paid the patent license fees for the video and audio codecs you're using. Not if you remove the DRM from commercial WMVHD-DVDs. etc.
Consider the DVD-Audio market and you'll see the same issue. CD's are "good enough".
That's just not true.
With HD video, EVERYONE can see the difference. Whether or not you think it's worth the extra money is a different issue.
With DVD-Audio and SACD, people literally can't hear any difference. Even on really good equipment, most people simply don't have ears that can percieve the extra range.
Most audio systems use different tricks to make people think it sounds better. Everything from DTS increasing the relative volume of the L/R channels. To 20-bit CDs cutting out low frequencies (so the middle frequencies are very loud) which makes it sounds more "clear", but ultimately very fake, and harder to listen to. But all those techniques will work just as well on standard CDs.
With video, we aren't anywhere near the limit of human vision, and you can't "fake" better resolution.
truck drivers leave their engines idling overnight to power their internal lights (sleeping area, small fridge) and external hazard lights.
No, not true at all. Internal and external lights use up a very small ammount of electricity, and big trucks have massive batteries that can certainly handle that.
you'd have to literally burn gallons of gas every time you started the engine for that to be true.
See, now, you're just not listening at all. You're considering the fuel consumption of a gasoline car while idling, which is why you're completely wrong. Diesel engines are completely different than gasoline (internal combustion) engines. They use just drops of fuel to keep the engine running when idle. Very, very different than what you're obviously familiar with.
That's fine for now, but surely going to change when they leave the "prototype" phase:
"A small team of Red Hat engineers are customizing a Red Hat distro to the processor and hardware specifications of the machine." http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/3393
I've seen a few electric designs that come with a little trailer that you can drag the generator along with for long trips.
Yes, concepts like the T-Zero do that. What I don't know is why we don't see it in production cars. Why isn't Honda/Toyota/Ford selling something like that (a serial-hybrid), with the generator built-in, instead of the more complex, more expensive, parallel hybrids?
There are a number of people who have modified Prius hybrids with a few extra batteries and tried the same sort of thing.
That's good and all, but it adds to the cost (rather than reducing the cost) and it's still a very complex hybrid system, with regular maintenance to be done, a very complex drive system, etc.
The HSD is a series-parallel hybrid (hybrid-hybrid).
HSD being, what? Human Systems Development? Historical Society of Delaware? Google's not finding it, so you'll have to be more specific. I'd certainly like to hear about it if there is actually a serial-hybrid out there.
Try this simulator
That simulator is a java applet, so it doesn't do a thing for me. But I can't see the point anyhow, as it's just a "simulator", using numbers somebody just pulled from the air, anyhow. Real-world tests are the only conclusive answers.
and reading this and try again.
That second link was pure, unadulterated bullshit, written by a complete moron. That guy doesn't even know what a serial hybrid *IS*, let alone what kind of fuel effeciency they would get. His statement that Honda and GM use serial hybrids is simply completely wrong, as any ammount of research would show.
Everything he said was pure ignorance, and often the exact opposite of reality. Read some of the comments on that page, who repeatedly try to correct the guy.
You are looking at it from a pie in the sky, "do it all right now or it's not worth doing" attitude.
No, not at all. What I'm saying is that NOTHING about hybrids is helping to advance fully electric or hydrogen technology.
However, right now pure electric cars are not viable because they cannot use the existing fuel infrastructure
Current hybrids do NOTHING to help change this. NOTHING. If they included electrical outlets, so the batteries could be charged, RATHER THAN COMPLETELY RELYING ON GASOLINE, then hybrids would encourage gas stations to install electrical charging stations as well. They are not doing that, or anything else for that matter, that would help or encourage the transition away from gasoline. It is not a step towards anything.
In addition, as I said, ELECTRIC CARS CAN USE THE EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE. Serial-hybrids, as they are called, are basically fully electric cars, with a gasoline/electric generator, so that they can use gasoline whenever electricity is not easily available. This is nothing like current hybrids, because current hybrids have a uslessly tiny bank of batteries, do not allow direct electric charging, and do not use their electric motors at highway speeds. The only development going on in current hybrids is specific to hybrids and will be of ABSOLUTELY NO USE to electric or hydrogen cars.
However, hybrids make a difference RIGHT NOW.
No, they are making absolutely no difference. They are expensive, fuel-effecient, gasoline cars. They do not have the capability to be anything more than that. They will not help transition anything, they will not help develop anything, they will not help advance anything. I thought I was very clear on this in my last post.
Hybrids allow the batteries we need for a pure electric car to be refined and perfected RIGHT NOW,
Bullshit. The battery packs hybrids use, do not even remotely resemble the banks of batteries fully electric cars need to use. The advances of battery technologies were happening without hybrids, and hybrids make battery capacity, weight, and size LESS important, not more important. They do not encourage development of better batteries AT ALL.
Hybrids allow more efficient electric drive trains to be developed RIGHT NOW while we still use gas for cars.
No. Electric motors were damn near 100% effecient long before hybrids came along. Where electric drive trains need help in at highway speeds, where hybrids DO NOT USE THEIR ELECTRIC MOTORS. Hybrids use electric motors were they already work incredibly well, and do not encourage development of anything better. Besides, like batteries (but even moreso), electric motors are such a huge market that whether or not they are used in hybrids doesn't even make a mark in their development.
while we still use gas for cars.
As I've said repeatedly. Serial hybrids would allow the use of gas whenever electricity is not easily available, while doing far, far more to allow the country to wean itself off of oil.
You can buy a hybrid car that costs essentially the same as a regular car but reduces our dependency on oil RIGHT NOW.
No, it won't reduce dependency on foreign oil, because non-hybrids can be equally as fuel effecient. The sticker may say 60MPG, but you're a fool if you believe you'll get that. Realistically, you're better off getting some much cheaper conventional car that gets 30+ MPG.
The up-front cost of a hybrid is nothing. The real cost lies in the massive additional maintenance. Not just replacement battery packs, but the added expense over a conventional car of any serving you need to have done.
How much gasoline is used to pay for these additional costs? How many more times will you be driving to the office to pay that off? How many mor
Saying "I can provide real and reliable sources" without actually doing so is just as dodgy, maybe even more so, than not talking about reliable sources at all.
That makes no sense at all. Anyone with even a passing understanding of the rules of logic would surely disagree with you.
In your own trollish way, you did sort-of ask for some sources, so here's a handful:
The very fact that they need to open new factories and strike deels with other manufacturers to help them if they can't manage enough production DOES mean that their fabs are cramped and working full steam.
No, it usually means they are planning ahead. Intel, in fact, is also opening new fabs, and that news, oddly enough, gets massive coverage on/.
There is no way on earth (or in hell) to provide three tons of scrap (and the energy needed to move them) to each human on the planet.
1. You'd be hard pressed to find a 3-ton car. Mine is just over 1-ton.
2. 5 year-old kids don't need their own 3-ton car to get around. 1 car for each person is a patently stupid over-simplification.
3. Despite the false premise of your assertion, it IS actually quite possible to produce enough energy to do as you suggest. Solar panels are continually improving, and biodiesel (unlike Ethanol) is quite pratical, right now. Genetic modifications of plants will make biodiesel far less expensive still. So long as you give the economy time to shift, it would be perfectly capable of supplying enough power for moving 3 tons for each living person.
pound for pound, gasoline contains far more energy than our best batteries.
That's technically true, but it doesn't take into account the fact that you don't need an engine, transmission, drive train, etc., to get the energy from those batteries, whereas you do with gasoline.
Look at a modern electric car, like the T-Zero, and you'll find it's not much heavier than similar gasoline-powered cars.
The problem with batteries, then, is that they take much too long to completely charge. Sure, you've got the 200+miles on a charge, but you can't pull-in to a station and fill-up your batteries in 5 minutes, as you can with gasoline.
What I don't know, is why nobody makes an all-electric car, with a small bank of batteries (eg. 50mile range), and then throw a small gas/electric generator in the back. You'll get fuel economy better than direct ICE cars even without the battery bank, and with the batteries, you can do 90% of your driving without any gasoline.
That being said, why hasn't anyone built a diesel-electric hybrid car? Surely it would maximize power & economy?
Rather pointless for a diesel. Cars get so much benefits out of hybrids because:
A) ICEs are grossly ineffecient at variable, low-speeds & B) ICEs waste a lot of gas sitting still, idling.
Diesel engines not only don't have those problems, but they are the exact opposite in many respects. Where it's more fuel effecient to shut-off a car engine while stopped at a light, and start it up again, that would be entirely backwards for a diesel. Diesel engines barely use any fuel when sitting there idling, but require a lot of power to start-up the engine. Hence truck drivers often just leave their trucks idling 8+ hours (overnight), rather than shutting them off.
Also, diesel engines are much more effecient at low-speed driving. They have a lot of low-end torque using little energy (as do electric engines) whereas ICE are not nearly as good at those speeds.
How about a Saturn Ion? I'm over 6' myself, and have no problem fitting into them. More head/leg room for the driver and passenger in compact Saturns than in any of the fullsize Toyotas I've been in. If you want to sit in the rear seat of a 4D, then it's a very different situation.
There are plenty of other inexpensive cars to choose from, of course, but I wouldn't recomend them...
Slashdot Mirror
That's not USUALLY the case. The culprits tend to be the ultra-cheap Chinese brands like "Apex", which I've wrestled with many times.
IMHO, the problem is much more than just the power draw... In an enclosed A/V cabinet, those devices will heat up an enclosed space even while off, and the both the extra heat as well as the heavier use of the power supply, will vastly shorten the life-span of the units.
Yes, SVideo/Composite/Coax.
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_pvr1
You can keep your 20 year-old VCR. My 4 year-old Hauppuage MPEG capture card also records anything you throw at it (ignores macrovision), and it does so in (slightly) higher quality than DVDs, without aty defects of analog, without needing to buy tapes, rewind, etc.
The PVR-150 is down to about $60 online, putting it only slightly higher than non-MPEG capture cards, making even old slow systems perfectly capable of capturing. Of course, you can get slightly higher quality with software encoding from a non-MPEG/MJPG capture card, but most people prefer the much lower system requirements of direct hardware MPEG captures.
Unlike napalm, which can only be used as an incidiary device, the way in which WP is used will change what type of weapon it is.
Upon exposure to atmospheric moisture, it becomes phosphoric acid. If that is only an incidental consequence, it's being used as an incidiary device. If using the acidic chemical properties against personel is intended, then it is being used as a chemical weapon.
Classification is a bit subjective, I must admit, but most agree it counts as a chemical weapon. Saying it's purely an incindiary weapon is patently false.
Yes, he is. He can't tell the difference between an exposive device, and a chemical device.
You're right that I exaggerated that point somewhat, but it's still requires a fairly small ammount to cause extreme pain and death, due to inhalation. And contrary to your statement, it does remain in concentrated and toxic form more than long enough to cause death to anyone in the near vicinity.
It will burn until it hits a dense solid like bone. Of course it depends how the particles contact your skin, but it certainly can burn it's way up your arm. Saying it cannot is totally incorrect.
That is an understatement.
This is just braindead reasoning. Bombs kill people by their explosive force. When you are downwind of an exploded bomb, the smoke might not be plesant, but breathing a particle or two won't cause your body to be burned from the inside out, starting with your lungs. Getting hit in the arm by a bullet will be immensely painful, but it won't be anywhere near the agonizing pain caused by WP, and bullets won't continue to slowly burn their way up your arm.
WP is DEFINED as a chemical weapon, because it IS a chemical weapon. End of story. If you still can't grasp that simple fact, that's your problem.
Would you rather be killed by a firing squad, a large bomb, or by being slowly burned to death? Or more accurately, being burned to death from inside, out, starting with your lungs?
Who's blaming the troops? Blame the commanders.
It's called CONTEXT...
Your question (to which I was replying), was clearly about a box with a SINGLE TUNER. Obviously, if that's not the case, then that advice doesn't apply.
Not even close. VCRs have no smarts at all. Computers can be hooked-up to IR transmitters and the like to control everything themselves.
Get an extra cable box, dedicate it to your PVR. You're going to be paying just as much (more) of an extra fee to get a smart card for this Microsoft box, as you would for an extra digital cable box from your provider.
Then don't give them your e-mail address. You aren't under oath to give them a valid address.
Have you been on the internet for more than a week? Arbitrary word@word.com e-mail addresses work find for 99.99% of web forms.
It's completely idiotic that sites insist on having something in the e-mail field, but it's only invading your privacy if you willingly offer up your private info to them.
Why not just plug a firewire cable from your cable box to your PC? No Microsoft DRM to contend with. No need to turn your nice flexible DVR into a restricted cable-box. No need to pay for more junk.
Someone want to tell me why anyone should be interested in this?
Why? You haven't given any reasons.
T2 Extreme uses this. It's unfortunately quite grainy, and more importantly, the DRM is worse than anything else out there.
Nice, but like WMV9, you're going to have a difficult time fitting 1080 content on a 9GB DVD at decent quality.
Well now you're just repeating yourself...
Quality is always a big question. Some material that compresses particularly well will look fine in high-def with H.264 on a 9GB DVD. Unfortunately, not all will.
Film has a LOT of noise, and noise is one of the very hardest things for a digital codec to compress.
I think DVDs have pretty well proven that none of the professionals can do a decent job of mastering any lossy codecs like MPEG-2. The more excess space they have on the media, the less their incompotence will matter, and the better 2rd generation copies (DVD rips) done by skilled individuals will look.
I didn't see h.264 in any of their specs. You have the choice of MPEG-2, Divx (MPEG-4), and WMV9. MPEG-2 is just like current DVDs, so don't expect highdef. MPEG-4 and WMV9 are about on-par, IMHO. They can both do HighDef, provided you have some strong denoising before encoding, allow infrequent keyframes, etc., but neither will be all that impressive.
I do, and I plan to in the future. But higher capacity discs will help in that process, immensely. Should we also bypass those that gave us DVDs, and stick to CDs? Or should we also bypass those who gave us CDs and stick to floppy disks?
Not unless you've paid the patent license fees for the video and audio codecs you're using. Not if you remove the DRM from commercial WMVHD-DVDs. etc.
That's just not true.
With HD video, EVERYONE can see the difference. Whether or not you think it's worth the extra money is a different issue.
With DVD-Audio and SACD, people literally can't hear any difference. Even on really good equipment, most people simply don't have ears that can percieve the extra range.
Most audio systems use different tricks to make people think it sounds better. Everything from DTS increasing the relative volume of the L/R channels. To 20-bit CDs cutting out low frequencies (so the middle frequencies are very loud) which makes it sounds more "clear", but ultimately very fake, and harder to listen to. But all those techniques will work just as well on standard CDs.
With video, we aren't anywhere near the limit of human vision, and you can't "fake" better resolution.
No, not true at all. Internal and external lights use up a very small ammount of electricity, and big trucks have massive batteries that can certainly handle that.
See, now, you're just not listening at all. You're considering the fuel consumption of a gasoline car while idling, which is why you're completely wrong. Diesel engines are completely different than gasoline (internal combustion) engines. They use just drops of fuel to keep the engine running when idle. Very, very different than what you're obviously familiar with.
That's fine for now, but surely going to change when they leave the "prototype" phase:
"A small team of Red Hat engineers are customizing a Red Hat distro to the processor and hardware specifications of the machine."
http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/3393
Yes, concepts like the T-Zero do that. What I don't know is why we don't see it in production cars. Why isn't Honda/Toyota/Ford selling something like that (a serial-hybrid), with the generator built-in, instead of the more complex, more expensive, parallel hybrids?
That's good and all, but it adds to the cost (rather than reducing the cost) and it's still a very complex hybrid system, with regular maintenance to be done, a very complex drive system, etc.
HSD being, what? Human Systems Development? Historical Society of Delaware? Google's not finding it, so you'll have to be more specific. I'd certainly like to hear about it if there is actually a serial-hybrid out there.
That simulator is a java applet, so it doesn't do a thing for me. But I can't see the point anyhow, as it's just a "simulator", using numbers somebody just pulled from the air, anyhow. Real-world tests are the only conclusive answers.
That second link was pure, unadulterated bullshit, written by a complete moron. That guy doesn't even know what a serial hybrid *IS*, let alone what kind of fuel effeciency they would get. His statement that Honda and GM use serial hybrids is simply completely wrong, as any ammount of research would show.
Everything he said was pure ignorance, and often the exact opposite of reality. Read some of the comments on that page, who repeatedly try to correct the guy.
They are doing just that. The fact that RedHat is doing it, doesn't mean they are just installing a stock Fedora release on the boxes.
No, not at all. What I'm saying is that NOTHING about hybrids is helping to advance fully electric or hydrogen technology.
Current hybrids do NOTHING to help change this. NOTHING. If they included electrical outlets, so the batteries could be charged, RATHER THAN COMPLETELY RELYING ON GASOLINE, then hybrids would encourage gas stations to install electrical charging stations as well. They are not doing that, or anything else for that matter, that would help or encourage the transition away from gasoline. It is not a step towards anything.
In addition, as I said, ELECTRIC CARS CAN USE THE EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE. Serial-hybrids, as they are called, are basically fully electric cars, with a gasoline/electric generator, so that they can use gasoline whenever electricity is not easily available. This is nothing like current hybrids, because current hybrids have a uslessly tiny bank of batteries, do not allow direct electric charging, and do not use their electric motors at highway speeds. The only development going on in current hybrids is specific to hybrids and will be of ABSOLUTELY NO USE to electric or hydrogen cars.
No, they are making absolutely no difference. They are expensive, fuel-effecient, gasoline cars. They do not have the capability to be anything more than that. They will not help transition anything, they will not help develop anything, they will not help advance anything. I thought I was very clear on this in my last post.
Bullshit. The battery packs hybrids use, do not even remotely resemble the banks of batteries fully electric cars need to use. The advances of battery technologies were happening without hybrids, and hybrids make battery capacity, weight, and size LESS important, not more important. They do not encourage development of better batteries AT ALL.
No. Electric motors were damn near 100% effecient long before hybrids came along. Where electric drive trains need help in at highway speeds, where hybrids DO NOT USE THEIR ELECTRIC MOTORS. Hybrids use electric motors were they already work incredibly well, and do not encourage development of anything better. Besides, like batteries (but even moreso), electric motors are such a huge market that whether or not they are used in hybrids doesn't even make a mark in their development.
As I've said repeatedly. Serial hybrids would allow the use of gas whenever electricity is not easily available, while doing far, far more to allow the country to wean itself off of oil.
No, it won't reduce dependency on foreign oil, because non-hybrids can be equally as fuel effecient. The sticker may say 60MPG, but you're a fool if you believe you'll get that. Realistically, you're better off getting some much cheaper conventional car that gets 30+ MPG.
The up-front cost of a hybrid is nothing. The real cost lies in the massive additional maintenance. Not just replacement battery packs, but the added expense over a conventional car of any serving you need to have done.
How much gasoline is used to pay for these additional costs? How many more times will you be driving to the office to pay that off? How many mor
There has never been a comment on /. more deserving of a "-1 Redundant" mod.
That makes no sense at all. Anyone with even a passing understanding of the rules of logic would surely disagree with you.
In your own trollish way, you did sort-of ask for some sources, so here's a handful:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,,1857009,00.asp
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardw
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/21/intel_chi
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/11/04/HNchips
http://news.com.com/2061-10801_3-5850416.html?par
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/09/intel_chi
http://www.channeltimes.com/channeltimes/jsp/arti
No, it usually means they are planning ahead. Intel, in fact, is also opening new fabs, and that news, oddly enough, gets massive coverage on
Holy Hell!
Does she wear a tiger-skin loin-cloth, carry a club around, and talk in short, broken english?
1. You'd be hard pressed to find a 3-ton car. Mine is just over 1-ton.
2. 5 year-old kids don't need their own 3-ton car to get around. 1 car for each person is a patently stupid over-simplification.
3. Despite the false premise of your assertion, it IS actually quite possible to produce enough energy to do as you suggest. Solar panels are continually improving, and biodiesel (unlike Ethanol) is quite pratical, right now. Genetic modifications of plants will make biodiesel far less expensive still. So long as you give the economy time to shift, it would be perfectly capable of supplying enough power for moving 3 tons for each living person.
That's technically true, but it doesn't take into account the fact that you don't need an engine, transmission, drive train, etc., to get the energy from those batteries, whereas you do with gasoline.
Look at a modern electric car, like the T-Zero, and you'll find it's not much heavier than similar gasoline-powered cars.
The problem with batteries, then, is that they take much too long to completely charge. Sure, you've got the 200+miles on a charge, but you can't pull-in to a station and fill-up your batteries in 5 minutes, as you can with gasoline.
What I don't know, is why nobody makes an all-electric car, with a small bank of batteries (eg. 50mile range), and then throw a small gas/electric generator in the back. You'll get fuel economy better than direct ICE cars even without the battery bank, and with the batteries, you can do 90% of your driving without any gasoline.
Rather pointless for a diesel. Cars get so much benefits out of hybrids because:
A) ICEs are grossly ineffecient at variable, low-speeds &
B) ICEs waste a lot of gas sitting still, idling.
Diesel engines not only don't have those problems, but they are the exact opposite in many respects. Where it's more fuel effecient to shut-off a car engine while stopped at a light, and start it up again, that would be entirely backwards for a diesel. Diesel engines barely use any fuel when sitting there idling, but require a lot of power to start-up the engine. Hence truck drivers often just leave their trucks idling 8+ hours (overnight), rather than shutting them off.
Also, diesel engines are much more effecient at low-speed driving. They have a lot of low-end torque using little energy (as do electric engines) whereas ICE are not nearly as good at those speeds.
How about a Saturn Ion? I'm over 6' myself, and have no problem fitting into them. More head/leg room for the driver and passenger in compact Saturns than in any of the fullsize Toyotas I've been in. If you want to sit in the rear seat of a 4D, then it's a very different situation.
There are plenty of other inexpensive cars to choose from, of course, but I wouldn't recomend them...