Yes! I remember this idea from when I was growing up in the early 70s. Nothing wrong in principal, but there are the same practical difficulties today that there were 50 years ago. You need an enormous (read expensive) high vacuum system. Switching "tracks" is very difficult at those speeds, the switch sections would need to be tremendously long. Tubes need to be point to point and follow very smooth curves - probably means very deep underground construction. Mostly point to point connections means that you need a lot more length of tubes than you would need for rail. The high speeds limit the minimum train separation and limit throughput - or you need to accept possibly horrendous multi-train wrecks.
While the system can recover the kinetic energy when it decelerates, it still needs a very high peak power output. The energy storage requirements if it is done onboard on the train are very difficult. If the energy is stored on the surface, then you either need active accelerating track (very expensive / length), or some way to transfer the power to the train (its much too fast for cantenary pickups).
You could in principal build something like this, but the capital costs would be huge. Consider the expected costs of the California high speed rail system - and that is just simple tracks on the surface.
I'd really love to see something like this (and have wanted to see it since I was a kid), but I just don't think its practical.
Boeing did whatever they thought was best for their bottom line. In this case is is quite likely that they DID pay for the repairs, though of course they may have had different arrangements with different airlines. They are very early in production after a very expensive development program. This is not the time to skimp on customer service and Boeing knows it.
Yes, it is surprisingly easy to shut down a major airport. They will probably catch you, but it would be an interesting form of non-violent terrorism.
It is really lucky that terrorist organizations aren't very clever.
Dear NSA, despite the use of the word "terrorism", I have no intention of violating US laws in order to influence US politics. I'm just using what little remains of my first amendment rights to make a political comment on US policies on terrorism.
I'm not saying the Moff Tarken didn't exceed his authority..... I'm sure there would have been a full investigation and a clarification of the rules of engagement.
Actually they could do some really nice movies showing the story from the other side. The legitimate government of the galaxy battling an unholy alliance of slavers, smugglers, and terrorists being manipulated by a secretive theocracy.
How many contractors died on death-star 2? The terrorist alliance tricked neolithic "ewoks" into a suicidal assault on an imperial base, just as a distraction. (OK, personally I don't mind ridding the universe of Ewoks, but it wasn't nice).
Was there even an attempt at a recall election for the chancellor? No, they went immediately to assassination because they found out that he belonged to a rival religious group.
All I really want though is 2 hours of the opening battle from episode 3......
Are you sure? The studies I've seen suggests that with a lot of power generation mixes, hybrids can be better than electrics.
ICEs are not heavy, they weigh a lot less that batteries. The comparison is between central plant -> transmission losses -> battery losses, vs. auto ICE. With the same fuel the electrics usually win, but coal generates a lot more CO2/energy than gasoline so I suspect it doesn't win.
Yes. "Weapon of mass destruction" has an understood meaning. To me its like calling a bus an aircraft. True it does travel though the air, but not in the manner we associate with the term "aircraft".
A pipe bomb does not cause "mass destruction", so using the word "mass destruction" is confusing.
If we call a pipe bomb a "weapon of mass destruction", what term would we use for a nuke that killed 100,000 people?
If we call a pressure-cooker bomb a "weapon on mass destruction", what do we call a nuke? WMD is a term that has long had a fairly well defined meaning: nukes, chemical weapons, bio-weapons. If we make the term mean something else, then we just need a new term. If we are going to make up a new term, the why not use it for small bombs?
Words matter! The debate over WMDs in Iraq will be more confusing in future discussions if we change the meaning of the word. It may seem like a good idea to the US to use words like that for emphasis, but what do we do when we are accused of using WMDs against civilian populations in the form of drone-strikes? Of is Israel is accused of using WMDs against Palestinians and demands are made that the US uphold its treaties?
The boston bomber should be accused of using an explosive device to commit mass murder and mayhem. A conviction on that should put him away for the rest of his life, or execute him.
It is the record of your motions that is a problem. An occasional incident of knowing where and when a person was driving is very different from a complete record of someone's movements.
If you see my car parked at a burger and beer place at 3pm on a Thursday, you can't deduce much. If you record my car arriving there at 11:30 every day, and leaving at 3:30, then you have information that might be interesting to employers.
License plate readers are just one piece of the growing array of technology that makes it possible for all of your activities to be monitored. This information is valuable to law enforcement, companies, and political interests.
If you have done impressive things over many years, you should have contacts who are aware of your abilities. An inside experienced contact at most companies can get a resume of someone they think is valuable in front of hiring managers.
Unfortunately if you don't have a formal education and don't have anyone who can vouch for you it will be very difficult. Put yourself in the position of a hiring manger with dozens of resumes on their desk - they are looking for an efficient way to cull the resumes down to a manageable number and formal qualifications are an easy (and generally reasonable) method.
The problem with fighting over the marble is that victory doesn't last. The US basically won in the 1990s, but it didn't really help. Even if you had a world-spanning totalitarian government, it would eventually fracture into groups fighting over the marble.
Civilizations rise and fall. We will give things one one by one: auto industry,nuclear power, space, high energy physics, fastest computers, tall buildings, high speed rail, commercial aircraft. Each time we will tell ourselves that we could do these things, we just don't want to anymore.
You are right. In addition for electron machines (like this one) the electrons need to be in a very small phase space to be useful for modern high brightness X-ray facilities. (small volume, small divergence, short pulse, low energy spread - 6 dimensional phase space, with good shot to shot stability.
Laser accelerators are a very interesting technology and have made huge advances in the last decade, but so far cannot replace the large machines. With continued research they may be able to do so in the future, but there is not a clear path to this at the moment.
Probably costs something like $10K/year to operate a small server. With the NSA's budget I would expect they could operate 10K-100K servers in locations around the world. These could be used for all sorts of functions, including honeypots, monitoring, and TOR monitoring.
If the NSA is operating the majority of TOR nodes does that make it easier for them to identify your location? Remember that they have a rather large computer budget.
There are a couple of operating X-ray lasers, at DESY in Hamburg, at SLAC (where I work) in California, and in Japan near Kyoto, with a few more under construction around the world. They are great research tools, but they are not useful for weapons: cannot be pointed, required enormous (kilometer-scale) equipment, and have average powers that are just not very dangerous.
I was really hoping that no one would think of portable radiation generators for this. The only way to stop this is to control some very broadly useful technologies - high voltage generators, vacuum equipment. The basic problem is that a clever person can do a huge amount of damage with readily available, difficult to regulate equipment. Unless we eliminate the situations that motivate terrorists (politically very difficult), we will either need ever increasing security and monitoring, or we will need to accept that a fair number of people will die. I'm willing to accept the deaths, but I don't think most americans are.
Agreed. The requirements are completely different. For starters airliners need to be pressurized so the connections would be very complex and heavy. Aircraft efficiency depends strongly on weight - no airline would want to spend the extra fuel that this weight would require. No passenger would want to ride in a train with airline type seating.
There is a huge debate in the pilot and mechanic community on whether lead protects valves. The guys at Gami engineering who have an engine test stand claim no, and I tend to believe them. The majority of opinions are tending in that direction as well.
That said, there are other differences between auto and aircraft gasoline. In particular since aircraft (even piston ones) sometimes operate at quite high altitudes the gasoline needs to be low vapor pressure, and free from water that could freeze in fuel lines etc. The ethanol that is (I think) mandated in automobile gas is bad for some components of aircraft engines.
I think there are reasonable unleaded avgas solutions, but some care is needed.
There have been some improvements in propellers - Hartzell makes some "scimitar" shaped propellers that are a bit quieter and marginally more efficient. Not a lot to be gained though since standard propellers are pretty high efficiency (maybe 90%?).
What you are suggesting is using smaller diameter propellers that turn faster. There unfortunately you are fighting aerodymaics. Propellers are wings. Wing tips add drag, so you want as few as you can. Thin wings are more efficient than fat wings. This pushes you to a small number of small thin blades - and 2-blade, think props are what you see on small aircraft.
There is a limit though in how much power a 2 blade thin prop can deliver so as engine power goes up, you get more blades (3, 4, sometimes ~7 on prop airliners), and the blades get fatter. This all decreases efficiency, but there seems to be no way around it. So, you could go up in prop RPMs but the loss in efficiency so far hasn't been worth it. With a single engine plane its also difficult because if the prop gets smaller in diamter, it is mostly shadowed by the fuselage of the aircraft. Twin (or more) engine planes can have smaller props out on the wings (and some do), but that is a small part of the general aviation market.
Before someone asks: piston engines are more efficient than turbines, but much worse power to weight. Large aircraft use turbines because the power to weight is so high that they can get to very high altitudes where the air is thin and there is low drag at high speeds. Flying that high really requires a pressurized cabin, so you don't see many turbines on small aircraft.
In any environmental issue like this it makes sense to compare the damage and the cost of mitigating that damage. The total aircraft fleet is very small (1/1000 of the automobile fleet) so the lead emissions are nothing like we used to have from cars. Still I would very much like to get the lead out of aviation gas if there were a way to do it and keep flying. The problem is that the money has to come from somewhere.
We could insist that aircraft only use unleaded. The problem is that the aircraft manufacturers have no interested in improving old planes, but most pilots cannot afford new ones: my '66 beechcraft baron cost about $100K to buy, a new one is about $1.2M. Replacing the engines would be about $90K even if engines certified for unleaded gas were available.
The airlines would love to see GA shut down, it just gets in their way and maybe this is an activity that we can no longer support. Maybe flying is to be left to the big corporations. Many countries have made personal aircraft prohibitively expensive.
On the bright side there are a couple of possible unleaded substitutes being tested. One works for some, but not all planes. Another seems to work in all planes but is a proprietary formulation and that is making the FAA nervous.
They are also much lower volume production than car engines. The designs are different enough that it isn't easy to just substitute automobile engines for aircraft use. Its been tried, and has worked in some cases, but not many.
Basically aircraft engines turn slowly (usually 2700 rpm max) because the propeller tips need to stay subsonic. Gear boxes are very heavy because of the large moment of inertia of the propellers and haven't worked very well in most installations. The low engine speed means that it needs very large displacement (9 liters is not uncommon) to get the required power. Light weight / high airflow give you air cooled, aluminum-finned engines. The aircraft engines are actually very efficient at their normal operating point. Part of this is due to the high compression allowed by high octane fuel.
Dear Mr. Bennette Haselton, Have you committed any infractions, misdemeanors, or felonies that are still withing the statue of limitations? Please note that a failure to answer correctly and completely may result in perjury charges.
The reason this outcome is worse is that there are a number of common activities that are technically criminal. This would allow the state to coerce an individual into revealing all such activities, possibly resulting in large fines or prison sentences. Law enforcement could direct these questions a selected individuals for political, or personal reasons. Imagine asking that question of a political candidate?
Example offenses: Speeding (most people are guilty of many counts). Statutory rape - in some jurisdictions when you were 18 and had sex with a 17 year old you committed a felony. Tax evasion - many people may be guilty of inadvertent tax fraud - but ignorance is not a legal excuse. Illegal dumping, trespassing, gambling, soliciting prostitutes, marijuana use, aiding and abetting underage drinking: these are all quite serious, but do we really want to imprison everyone who has done them?
There are two issues. You point out correctly that quantum efficiency is one. The other is noise level. Most cameras do not have single electron noise on the readout - ~20 electron readout noise is more typical (I think). So if Graphene has higher gain (more electrons per photon) then at VERY low light levels it would give a better signal. At high light levels (once the shot noise on the sensor is above the electronic noise) it would not help. This is why image intensifier cameras are used in some scientific applications where single photon detection is needed. The same argument is why photomultiplier tubes are still used in some applications even though they have worse QE than standard semiconductor detectors - the higher gain use useful for very low light levels.
I don't know that the graphene sensors actually ARE better than CMOS, but is it possible that they could be under ultra-low light conditions. In most cases though, the photon shot noise under those conditions would give pictures that aren't usable for normal photography. I'm a bit skeptical about them working to much longer wavelength though - unless they are cryogenically cooled they will run into thermal noise issues.
In this case the "facts" are complex. The amount of CO2 produced per KWh varies significantly with location and time. There can also be a significant difference between the average CO2/KwH and the marginal (the CO2/KWH for the plants that (statistically) would be turned on to charge a car that otherwise would not be there - these are different because utilities generally run the low emissions plants continuously.
It is also tricky to consider manufacturing power costs since you need to estimate the lifetime of the car and the amount of materials recovery.
What is interesting to me is that based on the "greencarreports" and ucsusa articles linked in the original here, the numbers are fairly close between a Tesla and a conventional car. To me, this means that while there is nothing particularly wrong with electric cars, it is not obvious that there is a significant advantage either. In that case subsidies and allowance of HOV lanes may not be warranted. In general subsidies for (typically expensive) electric cars seem to be a type of welfare for the wealthy since lower income people can't afford these cars.
BTW: I do not own an electric, though I might in the future for the home charging convenience. Driving is a small part of my personal carbon footprint.
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Yes! I remember this idea from when I was growing up in the early 70s. Nothing wrong in principal, but there are the same practical difficulties today that there were 50 years ago. You need an enormous (read expensive) high vacuum system. Switching "tracks" is very difficult at those speeds, the switch sections would need to be tremendously long. Tubes need to be point to point and follow very smooth curves - probably means very deep underground construction. Mostly point to point connections means that you need a lot more length of tubes than you would need for rail. The high speeds limit the minimum train separation and limit throughput - or you need to accept possibly horrendous multi-train wrecks.
While the system can recover the kinetic energy when it decelerates, it still needs a very high peak power output. The energy storage requirements if it is done onboard on the train are very difficult. If the energy is stored on the surface, then you either need active accelerating track (very expensive / length), or some way to transfer the power to the train (its much too fast for cantenary pickups).
You could in principal build something like this, but the capital costs would be huge. Consider the expected costs of the California high speed rail system - and that is just simple tracks on the surface.
I'd really love to see something like this (and have wanted to see it since I was a kid), but I just don't think its practical.
Boeing did whatever they thought was best for their bottom line. In this case is is quite likely that they DID pay for the repairs, though of course they may have had different arrangements with different airlines. They are very early in production after a very expensive development program. This is not the time to skimp on customer service and Boeing knows it.
Yes, it is surprisingly easy to shut down a major airport. They will probably catch you, but it would be an interesting form of non-violent terrorism.
It is really lucky that terrorist organizations aren't very clever.
Dear NSA,
despite the use of the word "terrorism", I have no intention of violating US laws in order to influence US politics. I'm just using what little remains of my first amendment rights to make a political comment on US policies on terrorism.
I'm not saying the Moff Tarken didn't exceed his authority.....
I'm sure there would have been a full investigation and a clarification of the rules of engagement.
Actually they could do some really nice movies showing the story from the other side. The legitimate government of the galaxy battling an unholy alliance of slavers, smugglers, and terrorists being manipulated by a secretive theocracy.
How many contractors died on death-star 2? The terrorist alliance tricked neolithic "ewoks" into a suicidal assault on an imperial base, just as a distraction. (OK, personally I don't mind ridding the universe of Ewoks, but it wasn't nice).
Was there even an attempt at a recall election for the chancellor? No, they went immediately to assassination because they found out that he belonged to a rival religious group.
All I really want though is 2 hours of the opening battle from episode 3......
Are you sure? The studies I've seen suggests that with a lot of power generation mixes, hybrids can be better than electrics.
ICEs are not heavy, they weigh a lot less that batteries. The comparison is between central plant -> transmission losses -> battery losses, vs. auto ICE. With the same fuel the electrics usually win, but coal generates a lot more CO2/energy than gasoline so I suspect it doesn't win.
Yes. "Weapon of mass destruction" has an understood meaning. To me its like calling a bus an aircraft. True it does travel though the air, but not in the manner we associate with the term "aircraft".
A pipe bomb does not cause "mass destruction", so using the word "mass destruction" is confusing.
If we call a pipe bomb a "weapon of mass destruction", what term would we use for a nuke that killed 100,000 people?
If we call a pressure-cooker bomb a "weapon on mass destruction", what do we call a nuke? WMD is a term that has long had a fairly well defined meaning: nukes, chemical weapons, bio-weapons. If we make the term mean something else, then we just need a new term. If we are going to make up a new term, the why not use it for small bombs?
Words matter! The debate over WMDs in Iraq will be more confusing in future discussions if we change the meaning of the word. It may seem like a good idea to the US to use words like that for emphasis, but what do we do when we are accused of using WMDs against civilian populations in the form of drone-strikes? Of is Israel is accused of using WMDs against Palestinians and demands are made that the US uphold its treaties?
The boston bomber should be accused of using an explosive device to commit mass murder and mayhem. A conviction on that should put him away for the rest of his life, or execute him.
It is the record of your motions that is a problem. An occasional incident of knowing where and when a person was driving is very different from a complete record of someone's movements.
If you see my car parked at a burger and beer place at 3pm on a Thursday, you can't deduce much. If you record my car arriving there at 11:30 every day, and leaving at 3:30, then you have information that might be interesting to employers.
License plate readers are just one piece of the growing array of technology that makes it possible for all of your activities to be monitored. This information is valuable to law enforcement, companies, and political interests.
If you have done impressive things over many years, you should have contacts who are aware of your abilities. An inside experienced contact at most companies can get a resume of someone they think is valuable in front of hiring managers.
Unfortunately if you don't have a formal education and don't have anyone who can vouch for you it will be very difficult. Put yourself in the position of a hiring manger with dozens of resumes on their desk - they are looking for an efficient way to cull the resumes down to a manageable number and formal qualifications are an easy (and generally reasonable) method.
The problem with fighting over the marble is that victory doesn't last. The US basically won in the 1990s, but it didn't really help. Even if you had a world-spanning totalitarian government, it would eventually fracture into groups fighting over the marble.
This is why we need more marbles.
Civilizations rise and fall. We will give things one one by one: auto industry,nuclear power, space, high energy physics, fastest computers, tall buildings, high speed rail, commercial aircraft. Each time we will tell ourselves that we could do these things, we just don't want to anymore.
You are right. In addition for electron machines (like this one) the electrons need to be in a very small phase space to be useful for modern high brightness X-ray facilities.
(small volume, small divergence, short pulse, low energy spread - 6 dimensional phase space, with good shot to shot stability.
Laser accelerators are a very interesting technology and have made huge advances in the last decade, but so far cannot replace the large machines. With continued research they may be able to do so in the future, but there is not a clear path to this at the moment.
Probably costs something like $10K/year to operate a small server. With the NSA's budget I would expect they could operate 10K-100K servers in locations around the world. These could be used for all sorts of functions, including honeypots, monitoring, and TOR monitoring.
If the NSA is operating the majority of TOR nodes does that make it easier for them to identify your location? Remember that they have a rather large computer budget.
There are a couple of operating X-ray lasers, at DESY in Hamburg, at SLAC (where I work) in California, and in Japan near Kyoto, with a few more under construction around the world. They are great research tools, but they are not useful for weapons: cannot be pointed, required enormous (kilometer-scale) equipment, and have average powers that are just not very dangerous.
I was really hoping that no one would think of portable radiation generators for this. The only way to stop this is to control some very broadly useful technologies - high voltage generators, vacuum equipment. The basic problem is that a clever person can do a huge amount of damage with readily available, difficult to regulate equipment. Unless we eliminate the situations that motivate terrorists (politically very difficult), we will either need ever increasing security and monitoring, or we will need to accept that a fair number of people will die. I'm willing to accept the deaths, but I don't think most americans are.
Agreed. The requirements are completely different. For starters airliners need to be pressurized so the connections would be very complex and heavy. Aircraft efficiency depends strongly on weight - no airline would want to spend the extra fuel that this weight would require. No passenger would want to ride in a train with airline type seating.
Just silly.
There is a huge debate in the pilot and mechanic community on whether lead protects valves. The guys at Gami engineering who have an engine test stand claim no, and I tend to believe them. The majority of opinions are tending in that direction as well.
That said, there are other differences between auto and aircraft gasoline. In particular since aircraft (even piston ones) sometimes operate at quite high altitudes the gasoline needs to be low vapor pressure, and free from water that could freeze in fuel lines etc. The ethanol that is (I think) mandated in automobile gas is bad for some components of aircraft engines.
I think there are reasonable unleaded avgas solutions, but some care is needed.
There have been some improvements in propellers - Hartzell makes some "scimitar" shaped propellers that are a bit quieter and marginally more efficient. Not a lot to be gained though since standard propellers are pretty high efficiency (maybe 90%?).
What you are suggesting is using smaller diameter propellers that turn faster. There unfortunately you are fighting aerodymaics. Propellers are wings. Wing tips add drag, so you want as few as you can. Thin wings are more efficient than fat wings. This pushes you to a small number of small thin blades - and 2-blade, think props are what you see on small aircraft.
There is a limit though in how much power a 2 blade thin prop can deliver so as engine power goes up, you get more blades (3, 4, sometimes ~7 on prop airliners), and the blades get fatter. This all decreases efficiency, but there seems to be no way around it. So, you could go up in prop RPMs but the loss in efficiency so far hasn't been worth it. With a single engine plane its also difficult because if the prop gets smaller in diamter, it is mostly shadowed by the fuselage of the aircraft. Twin (or more) engine planes can have smaller props out on the wings (and some do), but that is a small part of the general aviation market.
Before someone asks: piston engines are more efficient than turbines, but much worse power to weight. Large aircraft use turbines because the power to weight is so high that they can get to very high altitudes where the air is thin and there is low drag at high speeds. Flying that high really requires a pressurized cabin, so you don't see many turbines on small aircraft.
In any environmental issue like this it makes sense to compare the damage and the cost of mitigating that damage. The total aircraft fleet is very small (1/1000 of the automobile fleet) so the lead emissions are nothing like we used to have from cars. Still I would very much like to get the lead out of aviation gas if there were a way to do it and keep flying. The problem is that the money has to come from somewhere.
We could insist that aircraft only use unleaded. The problem is that the aircraft manufacturers have no interested in improving old planes, but most pilots cannot afford new ones: my '66 beechcraft baron cost about $100K to buy, a new one is about $1.2M. Replacing the engines would be about $90K even if engines certified for unleaded gas were available.
The airlines would love to see GA shut down, it just gets in their way and maybe this is an activity that we can no longer support. Maybe flying is to be left to the big corporations. Many countries have made personal aircraft prohibitively expensive.
On the bright side there are a couple of possible unleaded substitutes being tested. One works for some, but not all planes. Another seems to work in all planes but is a proprietary formulation and that is making the FAA nervous.
They are also much lower volume production than car engines. The designs are different enough that it isn't easy to just substitute automobile engines for aircraft use. Its been tried, and has worked in some cases, but not many.
Basically aircraft engines turn slowly (usually 2700 rpm max) because the propeller tips need to stay subsonic. Gear boxes are very heavy because of the large moment of inertia of the propellers and haven't worked very well in most installations. The low engine speed means that it needs very large displacement (9 liters is not uncommon) to get the required power. Light weight / high airflow give you air cooled, aluminum-finned engines. The aircraft engines are actually very efficient at their normal operating point. Part of this is due to the high compression allowed by high octane fuel.
Dear Mr. Bennette Haselton,
Have you committed any infractions, misdemeanors, or felonies that are still withing the statue of limitations? Please note that a failure to answer correctly and completely may result in perjury charges.
The reason this outcome is worse is that there are a number of common activities that are technically criminal. This would allow the state to coerce an individual into revealing all such activities, possibly resulting in large fines or prison sentences. Law enforcement could direct these questions a selected individuals for political, or personal reasons. Imagine asking that question of a political candidate?
Example offenses: Speeding (most people are guilty of many counts). Statutory rape - in some jurisdictions when you were 18 and had sex with a 17 year old you committed a felony. Tax evasion - many people may be guilty of inadvertent tax fraud - but ignorance is not a legal excuse. Illegal dumping, trespassing, gambling, soliciting prostitutes, marijuana use, aiding and abetting underage drinking: these are all quite serious, but do we really want to imprison everyone who has done them?
There are two issues. You point out correctly that quantum efficiency is one. The other is noise level. Most cameras do not have single electron noise on the readout - ~20 electron readout noise is more typical (I think). So if Graphene has higher gain (more electrons per photon) then at VERY low light levels it would give a better signal. At high light levels (once the shot noise on the sensor is above the electronic noise) it would not help. This is why image intensifier cameras are used in some scientific applications where single photon detection is needed. The same argument is why photomultiplier tubes are still used in some applications even though they have worse QE than standard semiconductor detectors - the higher gain use useful for very low light levels.
I don't know that the graphene sensors actually ARE better than CMOS, but is it possible that they could be under ultra-low light conditions. In most cases though, the photon shot noise under those conditions would give pictures that aren't usable for normal photography. I'm a bit skeptical about them working to much longer wavelength though - unless they are cryogenically cooled they will run into thermal noise issues.
In this case the "facts" are complex. The amount of CO2 produced per KWh varies significantly with location and time. There can also be a significant difference between the average CO2/KwH and the marginal (the CO2/KWH for the plants that (statistically) would be turned on to charge a car that otherwise would not be there - these are different because utilities generally run the low emissions plants continuously.
It is also tricky to consider manufacturing power costs since you need to estimate the lifetime of the car and the amount of materials recovery.
What is interesting to me is that based on the "greencarreports" and ucsusa articles linked in the original here, the numbers are fairly close between a Tesla and a conventional car. To me, this means that while there is nothing particularly wrong with electric cars, it is not obvious that there is a significant advantage either. In that case subsidies and allowance of HOV lanes may not be warranted. In general subsidies for (typically expensive) electric cars seem to be a type of welfare for the wealthy since lower income people can't afford these cars.
BTW: I do not own an electric, though I might in the future for the home charging convenience. Driving is a small part of my personal carbon footprint.