Also, don't forget that those nice fast charging stations that only take 30 minutes to recharge some EV cars, will only allow you to charge to 80% of full.
we already have an electrical distribution infrastructure
I just love you people who just don't have the knowledge or background to think through this problem adequately. Just because there's electric service everywhere doesn't mean we have EV charging everywhere; you make it sound like all you have to do is go down to Home Depot and buy a bunch of extension cords and call it good. Couldn't be further from reality. There's requirements for available circuit capacity, space availability, and a way to bill for the current used. These are non-trivial problems. Again: you can't just string up extension cords and call it good! Plugging into a wall outlet is the slowest and dumbest way to charge an EV. You NEED a high voltage charging post that handles billing (if in public places), they cost a couple thousand dollars each, and you NEED to install specific electric infrastructure to support it, and that costs money too. Even home charging stations cost $1000 and require you to have a 240V circuit that can handle the capacity, a homeowner cant DIY that, it has to be installed by an electrician, and that costs money too. Please, do the basic research before you comment on subjects like this.
Who pays for it? Have you dealt much with property management companies, or apartment management? They don't want to spend a single penny on anything they don't absolutely have to, and like any other business, they expect it to be an investment that returns a profit. That's just the installation of outlets all over the place; then there's the question of who pays for the electricity; the owners aren't going to do that, tennants aren't going to pay any flat fee or increase in their rent for something they may not be using or may not be using very much of, so there has to be some sort of metering system. Then there's the question of abuse and vandalism; anything in public areas of an apartment complex is subject to abuse of some sort or another. Now, if it's standard outlets then someone has to have their car sit there at least overnight to recharge it; do you really expect them to install dozens, or hundreds, of outlets, each of which has to be able to supply the full 10 or 15 amps? The cost would be enormous, the maintenance would be enormous, the overall management of it would be rediculous. That's just standard outlets we're talking about, which by now I think you're convinced is not practical at all. Commercial EV charging posts, that are networked and handle billing, charge faster, etc, cost a couple thousand dollars each, and that's not including installation costs! Now, you expect an apartment complex to install dozens or hundreds of these? Everyone's rent would at least double, and additionally they'd tack on a profit per kilowatt-hour of current used. The entire idea is a non-starter for private property, nobody is going to pay for it any way you do it. EV charging posts will have to be installed in municipal parking lots and parking garages, on public streets, and in other public areas (shopping mall parking lots, etc) in order to be practical, because only large companies with capital to invest and municipalities with funds or bond issues they could get passed by voters would be able to afford the enormous startup costs involved in installing the infrastucture. Also keep in mind that even a home 240V charging station for your garage costs at least $1000 to install.
So Verizon is taking lessons on business strategy from Microsoft now? Shove unwanted software down your customers' throats all in the name of profit? Them, them, fuck them. Yet another thing to add to my 'reasons to never own a smartphone' list. Hell, even the cheap-ass $50 LG phone AT&T gave me to replace my otherwise perfectly-working 2G phone (because they're decomissioning 2G towers, bastards!) has shit on it I don't want and would rather have the memory free for other things. What a shitfest mobile phones are becoming!
Here's the thing: As strange as it sounds? I'd much rather be the victim of an automobile accident that a human driver is responsible for, rather than some damned piece of software, because the manufacturer of the vehicle at fault will ultimately be who is sued over it -- and they'll lawyer the hell up way more than I ever could, and ultimately I'll get no justice. You can't put a piece of software on a witness stand in a civil or criminal trial; they'll claim "Oh, our software is thoroughly tested to Federal standards and passes all the tests, it couldn't possibly be at fault, this meatbag of a human driver over here must somehow have caused the accident regardless of evidence to the contrary!", no human programmer or any other human being will be held responsible, and as previously stated I will get NO JUSTICE. I say FUCK THAT NOISE; I'll keep driving myself, thank you very much, and I'll keep speakout against so-called 'self-driving, autonomous cars' because I think the whole concept sucks ass. The most I'll accept is this functionality as a sophisticated autopilot, or as a sophisticated collision-avoidance system; I will NOT accept a box on wheels with a seat and no controls for a human driver. EVER. The idea has all the appeal of being one of the cattle in line at a slaughterhouse.
You want to complain about incomptent drivers? Then lobby for reforms in driver education, training, and testing (which in my opinion are way overdue), and stricter laws regarding getting incompetent drivers out from behind the steering wheel; do not take away MY driving privilege, being a safe and competent driver, just to make way for your dystopian 'self-driving car' future, damnit!
they'll be a lot safer already than the average human driven car
Still don't want one and I wouldn't step into one that doesn't have a full set of manual controls for a human driver who can take control of the vehicle on a moments notice. Luckily for me it won't likely be in my lifetime that they'll allow anything on the road for which 'self driving' means anything more than 'sophisticated autopilot' and all cars will still have a full set of controls for a human driver. Again: DO NOT WANT. IDGAF how safe anyone claims they'll be, DO NOT WANT. I work in high tech, I know better!
On further consideration I don't think that if EVs catch on we'll have the EV equivalent of 'gas stations' we'll have charging points spread out all over the place due to the lack of needing underground tanks full of highly flammable and toxic liquid fuel and all the safety requirements necessary to protect against fire, explosion, and environmental damage. Shopping malls and municipal parking lots and garages will install them all over the place and make a few cents per kWh profit for their trouble. Businesses already install them. Combination parking meters and EV charging stands on public streets. Convenience stores setting them up in their parking lots and charging a premium to use them, just like they do with ATM machines right now. And so on. In other words it'll be decentralized; gas stations will remain gas stations for as long as we need gas stations, and ninety nine plus one, or ten times ten, or twenty-five times four years from now they'll be a thing of the past. At least unless battery technology progresses past the electrochemical stage and you can in fact fully charge the accumulator in your vehicle in a matter of minutes in which case the centralized 'filling station' will live on, except it'll look like an electric grid substation and be owned/operated/franchised by local electric utilities instead of oil companies.
In 5 years we still won't have 'fully autonomous, self-driving' cars, they'll still be full of bugs and flaws, and there's no fucking way I'd step into one and have no manual control over direction and speed.
Alleged criminals will just not keep incriminating things on their phones. I know if it came to pass that you were required to turn over your phone and passwords on demand, I'd go back to memorizing people's phone numbers, and never storing a single thing on the phone itself, ever. Maybe get a cheap-ass bare-bones $50 phone, and if they demand it, hand it to them and tell them to keep it, tell the wireless company I lost it, and get another one.
Has reading every single word carefully become something nobody does anymore? I said: ONE HUNDRED YEARS, as in NINETY-NINE PLUS ONE, not 'several hundred years', and for fuck's sake it's not a hard-and-fast number of years, it's 'MORE OR LESS' that much.
Wow. Just, wow. You're WAY out on the fringes there, buddy; you're almost not having the same conversation on the same subject as the rest of us.
We're not talking about 'gas station profitability', we're talking about EV charging station infrastructure and the feasability of switchover to EVs from ICE vehicles in the 2016 decade. Nobody really cares about snacks or fast food or bathrooms, or even commercial recharging stations, for purposes of this conversation; in fact as a sidebar to this it's highly likely that in a future where EVs are ubiquitos and the norm, there won't even be a NEED for centralized, commercial recharging stations, they'll potentially be everywhere, connected wirelessly via the cellphone network, and you pay via a smartphone app or via a secure website as you do today with current EV charging posts.
You already need a power tap to run the pumps. This just cuts out the pump between your car and the grid.
LOL no, an electric pump to pull liquid fuel out of an underground tank requires a tiny fraction of the total power that an EV version of a gas station would require if all available charging positions were in use simultaneously, especially if battery technology progresses to the point where you can fast-charge a vehicle's cells to full capacity in a matter of minutes instead of hours; you'd have to tear everything up to install the cabling and devices required to support it all; a centralized EV charging station on the scale of a large-sizeed gas station would end up looking like a small electric utility substation because it would more or less be an electric utility substation. In fact now that I think about it it's more likely that electric companies would end up building/owning/operating these instead of the oil companies. Please, do a little research into subjects you don't understand (like anything regarding electricity, apparently, in your case) before you make foolish comments, k?
Do you need to clean your glasses? Or make sure you've had enough caffeine before posting? Or is your reading comprehension absolute shit and/or you're just plain dumb?
Let me say it a little LOUDER in case you're deaf, too: I SAID ONE HUNDRED (I.E. 10^2, 100, ONE ZERO ZERO) YEARS, NOT ***SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS***, DAMNIT!
How nice for you. However you're totally ignoring the original commetors' point: Not everyone lives in a HOUSE, many people live in apartments or other places where it becomes very very problematic to have to plug in a vehicle to charge it overnight. No apartments I ever used to live in would tolerate people running extension cords out their back windows every day, and that's assuming you could even park that close. No way the vast majority of property owners would ante up for EV charging stations, and in a large apartment complex there would have to be dozens of them to serve everyone.
The real problem boils down to infrastructure. We've had a hundred years to build up the infrastructure to refuel IC engine vehicles pretty much anywhere. EV charging stations are few and far between and even high-voltage high-current types like Tesla uses aren't as fast as dumping gasoline into your tank. It will take decades to build up the infrastructure to serve mass amounts of electric vehicles, and it still won't be anywhere near as fast as refilling a liquid fuel tank. It'll take decades more to progress battery technology to the point where it's as fast and convenient to recharge as it is right now to dump 10 or 12 gallons of fuel into a tank. That's assuming the idea ever catches on enough that a large enough fraction of the population moves to electric vehicles to force the changeover. Face it, we've got a long, long ways to go yet before electric vehicle acceptance is not only popular, but practical.
I didn't even bother mentioning those because they're likewise still not enough to get anything 4 light years from here in anything less than 100 years, and the way things are going in 100 years there won't BE anyone around to receive the signal from it, assuming it even makes it there at all. I think maybe we should be concentrating more on fixing major problems with Earth and human race that will one way or another wipe us out before we expend any major efforts trying to get to another star, unless someone discovers a way to have an FTL drive and technology to protect us from all the radiation out there.
I think most people have a very different idea of what it means to live off the grid.
Correct, and TFA doesn't get it. Living 'off the grid' means: o No Internet o No phone o Using cash for everything, no electronic funds transfers of any kind
It may also mean: o Not using electricity from the local provider, or not using electricity at all o Not using natural gas from the local provider, or at all
It might even go so far as to mean: o Not using municipal water or sewer sources, or even waste collection services
Of course there are problems with all the above. In many places if you do not have electric service in active use at your residence, it is automatically considered to be 'uninhabitable' and will be condemned, even if you have a generator or some other self-produced power source, or just plain don't need it at all; wouldn't at all be surprised if it's the same with water and sewer service in many places. Going cash-only in 2016 means you get flagged as a possible terrorist and/or criminal, which means getting law enforcement up in your business. Not having Internet or a phone? Good luck getting any sort of meaningful paying work, and if you're self-employed, how will your customers contact you? Furthermore if you go cash-only and are self-employed, what's that going to look like to your customers? Another thing: you go cash-only and are self-employed, guarantee you you'll have the IRS and maybe the Justice Department all over you and up in your business for potential tax evasion and maybe suspicion of money laundering. If I sat here long enough thinking through it, I could keep coming up with things that would make it difficult-to-impossible to be completely 'off the grid'; it becomes an unending game of whack-a-mole of problems, with one 'solution' giving rise to more problems to solve, and in the end you end up looking like Ted Kaczynski to most people. Maybe you could live 'off the grid' in 1916, but in 2016 the game is rigged against you being able to do so at all; we live in the Surveillance Age now. Your best bet is to learn how to 'hide in plain sight' and blend in with all the white noise.
"meaning it could someday be considered for the world's first interstellar mission."
Sure. All we need to do is get past this trivial little hurdle of using chemical reaction motors to move things. Will someone look up Zefram Cochrane in the White Pages and tell him to go apply for a job at NASA or (more likely) SpaceX? We'll need that warp drive ASAP, and get a team on designing navigational deflectors and subspace communications while you're at it, k? Just don't let Musk have anything to do with the navigation systems, we don't need the first warp-capable human spacecraft crashing into the Moon or something because it got rushed to market.
Hi there drinkypoo. Your idea is still as stupid as the first time this week you said it. Your 'mesh network internet' would rapidly become a haven for pedophiles trafficking in child porn, and other criminals and their criminal activity, including invading other people's computers on the network, stealing their data and personal information, and stealing their identities; the FBI would step in, there would be lots of arrests, and before too long the whole practice would be outlawed, ruining it for everyone, and mesh networks would be regulated to within an inch of their lives just like drone-toys are now, all because of some jackasses and assholes who can't control themselves. So think we'll skip that and deprecate people like you who come up with such fucktarded concepts instead and avoid all the hassle.
No, see, I'm sorry but you're wrong, and your comment had little to do with my own comment. The recording industry clearly does want to stop ALL piracy of ALL kinds. They'd love nothing better than to go back in time, and make all consumer-class recording devices (reel-to-reel, cassette, the VCR) illegal, until they could come up with versions that they could 100% control, so everyone would have to pay, pay, pay through the nose, ad infinitum. They make that clear with every decision they make now that attempts to limit what people can do with the content they purchase, and I maintain that if they had their way, they'd find a way to monetize your ears so you can't even hear content unless you pay them. Do you remember DivX? No, not just the video compression algorithm, but the whole DivX system? You buy a DVD, but it's a DivX DVD, which takes a special player, which has to be connected to a phone line, and you pay a rental fee every time you want to play the disc; the disc itself was cheap (a few dollars) but the point was you'd have to pay every time you wanted to see it. Few remember that now because it was a total failure; nobody fell for it, especially the video rental stores at the time, for whom it would have put them out of business. Then there's the infamous Sony rootkit fiasco; let's install a rootkit DRM system on people's computers without their express permission, and hide the fact from them. Both examples of how far the media industry will go to limit what people can do with the content they purchase. Regardless of further extreme examples or the lack thereof, the desire to go that far, or farther, still exists, and given the means and opportunity believe you me that they'd find a way to disable your ears and make you pay a rental fee on being able to hear anything if they thought they could get away with it.
See, that's what makes me believe that all these media industry goons are as technologically incompetent as your average politician, government official, or law enforcement: In order to be heard by the human ear, ALL digital audio must, at some point, be converted back to a baseband analog audio signal, in order to be reproduced by an electrical-to-sound pressure transducer (aka 'a speaker') of some sort, so that the sound-pressure-to-neural impulse transducers in the human body (aka 'your ears') can PERCEIVE IT. There's literally no way around it. Even if, in some totally dystopian future, where you can ONLY use 'approved' digital-input-only speakers and headphones (that of course they put anti-tampering in, so if you open or attempt to modify them, they self-destruct) it still has to produce sound waves in the air so you can hear it! What else would they do? Digital-only DRM microphones, that communicate ultrasonically with digital-only DRM speakers, and turn themselves off if you're attempting to record from a DRM source? Bull-fucking-shit. Audio professionals would never stand for it, there would be pro-level equipment with no such restrictions. Also there would always be some South Asian company making adapters to get around it, or hackers making their own, or 'illegal' software to strip DRM from audio files.. it would be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, everything would cost orders of magnitude more than it does now -- and nobody would stand for it, and everyone would go bankrupt. It's all utter madness, and it's not going to happen.
Bottom line: o There will always be baseband analog audio in one form or another. o You can't 100% prevent someone from recording or otherwise converting DRM'd audio, and it's madness to even TRY. o People are going to share things whether you want them to or not o Trying to PREVENT them from doing so is a negative-sum game; don't even try. o Overly-draconic DRM and copyright schemes just piss people off and make them want to spend LESS money, not MORE. o Go get your Bluetooth-to-headphone adapter or USB-to-headphone adapter and stop complaining, it's all good. o Look at it this way: you have an opportunity to get a better DAC this way. o You're probably better off this way anyway, so many of you manage to break your headphone jacks, this way the replacement is quick and easy.
As someone else said: one direction this could go, is that ANY traffic that isn't sent in the clear could be classified as some sort of copyright infringement. That would even include https:/// traffic, since technically an ISP is not supposed to be snooping on that; under current laws they would be committing a cybercrime if they did. Also anyone using TOR or any other onion-routing network would have to be considered potentially infringing on someone's copyright, since it's encrypted and therefore they would have to assume that it's something illegal. Add to this the well-known fact that technology-ignorant (or just power-hungry; you be the judge) politicians, government officials, and law enforcement all would love it if all encryption was outlawed (except, of course, for them, and doubtlessly the rich 1%, who will have 'exemptions' because they're 'important' or somesuch bullshit; but I diverge..) and everything was sent in the clear -- even banking transactions, I'm sure, since they want to know where every penny you have is going (you might be funding terrorism, or buying something illegal!), all of which would essentially make the Internet completely unusable for any serious purposes; after that point only a fool would use it for anything, knowing that every single byte that goes in or out would be sifted and analyzed even worse than it is right now..
Nope, nope, nope.. 'Rightscorp' needs to be destroyed, completely erradicated; they are part of the Cancer that is killing the Internet; they are why we can't have nice things. Them, them, fuck them. ISPs should not be part of law enforcement. ISPs may be the gateway to the Internet, but they should not be the GATEKEEPERS.
Facebook will 'still be a thing' for another couple years before it goes the way of AOL, Myspace, and Livejournal -- and I'll cheer when it does, because Facebook is flat-out evil as well as fucking stupid. I'll point and laugh at Zuckerberg as he peddles pencils on streetcorners to get enough money for his daily forty-ouncer.
..but I digress from why I'm commenting. Let me tell you what's going to happen: Facebook will change it's Terms of Service to specifically prohibit using an adblocker of any kind; that's the nuclear bomb they'll drop, and it'll be a true doomsday device for everyone: people will leave Facebook in droves, and Facebook will be over. What we're seeing today, with this player-versus-player game of whack-a-mole is just the opening volleys of the Ad War. The only other 'nuclear option' I can think of, is that Facebook starts charging a subscription fee if you don't want to see ads -- which will likewise kill off Facebook for good. It's inevitable: The Facebook Doomsday Clock is ticking, and it's at one minute to midnight right now. Bye bye, Facebook; and nothing of value will have been lost.
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Would someone please explain why this is?
Never mind, 1 google search gave me the answer and it's related to how the charging curve flattens out severely starting at 80%.
Also, don't forget that those nice fast charging stations that only take 30 minutes to recharge some EV cars, will only allow you to charge to 80% of full.
Would someone please explain why this is?
we already have an electrical distribution infrastructure
I just love you people who just don't have the knowledge or background to think through this problem adequately. Just because there's electric service everywhere doesn't mean we have EV charging everywhere; you make it sound like all you have to do is go down to Home Depot and buy a bunch of extension cords and call it good. Couldn't be further from reality. There's requirements for available circuit capacity, space availability, and a way to bill for the current used. These are non-trivial problems. Again: you can't just string up extension cords and call it good! Plugging into a wall outlet is the slowest and dumbest way to charge an EV. You NEED a high voltage charging post that handles billing (if in public places), they cost a couple thousand dollars each, and you NEED to install specific electric infrastructure to support it, and that costs money too. Even home charging stations cost $1000 and require you to have a 240V circuit that can handle the capacity, a homeowner cant DIY that, it has to be installed by an electrician, and that costs money too. Please, do the basic research before you comment on subjects like this.
Who pays for it? Have you dealt much with property management companies, or apartment management? They don't want to spend a single penny on anything they don't absolutely have to, and like any other business, they expect it to be an investment that returns a profit. That's just the installation of outlets all over the place; then there's the question of who pays for the electricity; the owners aren't going to do that, tennants aren't going to pay any flat fee or increase in their rent for something they may not be using or may not be using very much of, so there has to be some sort of metering system. Then there's the question of abuse and vandalism; anything in public areas of an apartment complex is subject to abuse of some sort or another. Now, if it's standard outlets then someone has to have their car sit there at least overnight to recharge it; do you really expect them to install dozens, or hundreds, of outlets, each of which has to be able to supply the full 10 or 15 amps? The cost would be enormous, the maintenance would be enormous, the overall management of it would be rediculous. That's just standard outlets we're talking about, which by now I think you're convinced is not practical at all. Commercial EV charging posts, that are networked and handle billing, charge faster, etc, cost a couple thousand dollars each, and that's not including installation costs! Now, you expect an apartment complex to install dozens or hundreds of these? Everyone's rent would at least double, and additionally they'd tack on a profit per kilowatt-hour of current used. The entire idea is a non-starter for private property, nobody is going to pay for it any way you do it. EV charging posts will have to be installed in municipal parking lots and parking garages, on public streets, and in other public areas (shopping mall parking lots, etc) in order to be practical, because only large companies with capital to invest and municipalities with funds or bond issues they could get passed by voters would be able to afford the enormous startup costs involved in installing the infrastucture. Also keep in mind that even a home 240V charging station for your garage costs at least $1000 to install.
So Verizon is taking lessons on business strategy from Microsoft now? Shove unwanted software down your customers' throats all in the name of profit? Them, them, fuck them. Yet another thing to add to my 'reasons to never own a smartphone' list. Hell, even the cheap-ass $50 LG phone AT&T gave me to replace my otherwise perfectly-working 2G phone (because they're decomissioning 2G towers, bastards!) has shit on it I don't want and would rather have the memory free for other things. What a shitfest mobile phones are becoming!
Here's the thing: As strange as it sounds? I'd much rather be the victim of an automobile accident that a human driver is responsible for, rather than some damned piece of software, because the manufacturer of the vehicle at fault will ultimately be who is sued over it -- and they'll lawyer the hell up way more than I ever could, and ultimately I'll get no justice. You can't put a piece of software on a witness stand in a civil or criminal trial; they'll claim "Oh, our software is thoroughly tested to Federal standards and passes all the tests, it couldn't possibly be at fault, this meatbag of a human driver over here must somehow have caused the accident regardless of evidence to the contrary!", no human programmer or any other human being will be held responsible, and as previously stated I will get NO JUSTICE. I say FUCK THAT NOISE; I'll keep driving myself, thank you very much, and I'll keep speakout against so-called 'self-driving, autonomous cars' because I think the whole concept sucks ass. The most I'll accept is this functionality as a sophisticated autopilot, or as a sophisticated collision-avoidance system; I will NOT accept a box on wheels with a seat and no controls for a human driver. EVER. The idea has all the appeal of being one of the cattle in line at a slaughterhouse.
You want to complain about incomptent drivers? Then lobby for reforms in driver education, training, and testing (which in my opinion are way overdue), and stricter laws regarding getting incompetent drivers out from behind the steering wheel; do not take away MY driving privilege, being a safe and competent driver, just to make way for your dystopian 'self-driving car' future, damnit!
they'll be a lot safer already than the average human driven car
Still don't want one and I wouldn't step into one that doesn't have a full set of manual controls for a human driver who can take control of the vehicle on a moments notice. Luckily for me it won't likely be in my lifetime that they'll allow anything on the road for which 'self driving' means anything more than 'sophisticated autopilot' and all cars will still have a full set of controls for a human driver. Again: DO NOT WANT. IDGAF how safe anyone claims they'll be, DO NOT WANT. I work in high tech, I know better!
Nah, I know a smartass when I see one, and that's a different critter entirely from the garden-variety internet troll. I was just poking you back.
Hey f****t I found your picture on the interwebs
On further consideration I don't think that if EVs catch on we'll have the EV equivalent of 'gas stations' we'll have charging points spread out all over the place due to the lack of needing underground tanks full of highly flammable and toxic liquid fuel and all the safety requirements necessary to protect against fire, explosion, and environmental damage. Shopping malls and municipal parking lots and garages will install them all over the place and make a few cents per kWh profit for their trouble. Businesses already install them. Combination parking meters and EV charging stands on public streets. Convenience stores setting them up in their parking lots and charging a premium to use them, just like they do with ATM machines right now. And so on. In other words it'll be decentralized; gas stations will remain gas stations for as long as we need gas stations, and ninety nine plus one, or ten times ten, or twenty-five times four years from now they'll be a thing of the past. At least unless battery technology progresses past the electrochemical stage and you can in fact fully charge the accumulator in your vehicle in a matter of minutes in which case the centralized 'filling station' will live on, except it'll look like an electric grid substation and be owned/operated/franchised by local electric utilities instead of oil companies.
In 5 years we still won't have 'fully autonomous, self-driving' cars, they'll still be full of bugs and flaws, and there's no fucking way I'd step into one and have no manual control over direction and speed.
* * * DO NOT WANT !!! * * *
Alleged criminals will just not keep incriminating things on their phones. I know if it came to pass that you were required to turn over your phone and passwords on demand, I'd go back to memorizing people's phone numbers, and never storing a single thing on the phone itself, ever. Maybe get a cheap-ass bare-bones $50 phone, and if they demand it, hand it to them and tell them to keep it, tell the wireless company I lost it, and get another one.
so NOT hundreds of years
Has reading every single word carefully become something nobody does anymore? I said: ONE HUNDRED YEARS, as in NINETY-NINE PLUS ONE, not 'several hundred years', and for fuck's sake it's not a hard-and-fast number of years, it's 'MORE OR LESS' that much.
We're not talking about 'gas station profitability', we're talking about EV charging station infrastructure and the feasability of switchover to EVs from ICE vehicles in the 2016 decade. Nobody really cares about snacks or fast food or bathrooms, or even commercial recharging stations, for purposes of this conversation; in fact as a sidebar to this it's highly likely that in a future where EVs are ubiquitos and the norm, there won't even be a NEED for centralized, commercial recharging stations, they'll potentially be everywhere, connected wirelessly via the cellphone network, and you pay via a smartphone app or via a secure website as you do today with current EV charging posts.
You already need a power tap to run the pumps. This just cuts out the pump between your car and the grid.
LOL no, an electric pump to pull liquid fuel out of an underground tank requires a tiny fraction of the total power that an EV version of a gas station would require if all available charging positions were in use simultaneously, especially if battery technology progresses to the point where you can fast-charge a vehicle's cells to full capacity in a matter of minutes instead of hours; you'd have to tear everything up to install the cabling and devices required to support it all; a centralized EV charging station on the scale of a large-sizeed gas station would end up looking like a small electric utility substation because it would more or less be an electric utility substation. In fact now that I think about it it's more likely that electric companies would end up building/owning/operating these instead of the oil companies. Please, do a little research into subjects you don't understand (like anything regarding electricity, apparently, in your case) before you make foolish comments, k?
(that's not 'hundreds of years' ago)
..right after YOU QUOTED ME STATING:
We've had a hundred years
Do you need to clean your glasses? Or make sure you've had enough caffeine before posting? Or is your reading comprehension absolute shit and/or you're just plain dumb?
Let me say it a little LOUDER in case you're deaf, too: I SAID ONE HUNDRED (I.E. 10^2, 100, ONE ZERO ZERO) YEARS, NOT ***SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS***, DAMNIT!
I arrive home, plug in and leave it.
How nice for you. However you're totally ignoring the original commetors' point: Not everyone lives in a HOUSE, many people live in apartments or other places where it becomes very very problematic to have to plug in a vehicle to charge it overnight. No apartments I ever used to live in would tolerate people running extension cords out their back windows every day, and that's assuming you could even park that close. No way the vast majority of property owners would ante up for EV charging stations, and in a large apartment complex there would have to be dozens of them to serve everyone.
The real problem boils down to infrastructure. We've had a hundred years to build up the infrastructure to refuel IC engine vehicles pretty much anywhere. EV charging stations are few and far between and even high-voltage high-current types like Tesla uses aren't as fast as dumping gasoline into your tank. It will take decades to build up the infrastructure to serve mass amounts of electric vehicles, and it still won't be anywhere near as fast as refilling a liquid fuel tank. It'll take decades more to progress battery technology to the point where it's as fast and convenient to recharge as it is right now to dump 10 or 12 gallons of fuel into a tank. That's assuming the idea ever catches on enough that a large enough fraction of the population moves to electric vehicles to force the changeover. Face it, we've got a long, long ways to go yet before electric vehicle acceptance is not only popular, but practical.
I didn't even bother mentioning those because they're likewise still not enough to get anything 4 light years from here in anything less than 100 years, and the way things are going in 100 years there won't BE anyone around to receive the signal from it, assuming it even makes it there at all. I think maybe we should be concentrating more on fixing major problems with Earth and human race that will one way or another wipe us out before we expend any major efforts trying to get to another star, unless someone discovers a way to have an FTL drive and technology to protect us from all the radiation out there.
I think most people have a very different idea of what it means to live off the grid.
Correct, and TFA doesn't get it. Living 'off the grid' means:
o No Internet
o No phone
o Using cash for everything, no electronic funds transfers of any kind
It may also mean:
o Not using electricity from the local provider, or not using electricity at all
o Not using natural gas from the local provider, or at all
It might even go so far as to mean:
o Not using municipal water or sewer sources, or even waste collection services
Of course there are problems with all the above. In many places if you do not have electric service in active use at your residence, it is automatically considered to be 'uninhabitable' and will be condemned, even if you have a generator or some other self-produced power source, or just plain don't need it at all; wouldn't at all be surprised if it's the same with water and sewer service in many places. Going cash-only in 2016 means you get flagged as a possible terrorist and/or criminal, which means getting law enforcement up in your business. Not having Internet or a phone? Good luck getting any sort of meaningful paying work, and if you're self-employed, how will your customers contact you? Furthermore if you go cash-only and are self-employed, what's that going to look like to your customers? Another thing: you go cash-only and are self-employed, guarantee you you'll have the IRS and maybe the Justice Department all over you and up in your business for potential tax evasion and maybe suspicion of money laundering. If I sat here long enough thinking through it, I could keep coming up with things that would make it difficult-to-impossible to be completely 'off the grid'; it becomes an unending game of whack-a-mole of problems, with one 'solution' giving rise to more problems to solve, and in the end you end up looking like Ted Kaczynski to most people. Maybe you could live 'off the grid' in 1916, but in 2016 the game is rigged against you being able to do so at all; we live in the Surveillance Age now. Your best bet is to learn how to 'hide in plain sight' and blend in with all the white noise.
"meaning it could someday be considered for the world's first interstellar mission."
Sure. All we need to do is get past this trivial little hurdle of using chemical reaction motors to move things. Will someone look up Zefram Cochrane in the White Pages and tell him to go apply for a job at NASA or (more likely) SpaceX? We'll need that warp drive ASAP, and get a team on designing navigational deflectors and subspace communications while you're at it, k? Just don't let Musk have anything to do with the navigation systems, we don't need the first warp-capable human spacecraft crashing into the Moon or something because it got rushed to market.
Hi there drinkypoo. Your idea is still as stupid as the first time this week you said it. Your 'mesh network internet' would rapidly become a haven for pedophiles trafficking in child porn, and other criminals and their criminal activity, including invading other people's computers on the network, stealing their data and personal information, and stealing their identities; the FBI would step in, there would be lots of arrests, and before too long the whole practice would be outlawed, ruining it for everyone, and mesh networks would be regulated to within an inch of their lives just like drone-toys are now, all because of some jackasses and assholes who can't control themselves. So think we'll skip that and deprecate people like you who come up with such fucktarded concepts instead and avoid all the hassle.
No, see, I'm sorry but you're wrong, and your comment had little to do with my own comment. The recording industry clearly does want to stop ALL piracy of ALL kinds. They'd love nothing better than to go back in time, and make all consumer-class recording devices (reel-to-reel, cassette, the VCR) illegal, until they could come up with versions that they could 100% control, so everyone would have to pay, pay, pay through the nose, ad infinitum. They make that clear with every decision they make now that attempts to limit what people can do with the content they purchase, and I maintain that if they had their way, they'd find a way to monetize your ears so you can't even hear content unless you pay them. Do you remember DivX? No, not just the video compression algorithm, but the whole DivX system? You buy a DVD, but it's a DivX DVD, which takes a special player, which has to be connected to a phone line, and you pay a rental fee every time you want to play the disc; the disc itself was cheap (a few dollars) but the point was you'd have to pay every time you wanted to see it. Few remember that now because it was a total failure; nobody fell for it, especially the video rental stores at the time, for whom it would have put them out of business. Then there's the infamous Sony rootkit fiasco; let's install a rootkit DRM system on people's computers without their express permission, and hide the fact from them. Both examples of how far the media industry will go to limit what people can do with the content they purchase. Regardless of further extreme examples or the lack thereof, the desire to go that far, or farther, still exists, and given the means and opportunity believe you me that they'd find a way to disable your ears and make you pay a rental fee on being able to hear anything if they thought they could get away with it.
See, that's what makes me believe that all these media industry goons are as technologically incompetent as your average politician, government official, or law enforcement: In order to be heard by the human ear, ALL digital audio must, at some point, be converted back to a baseband analog audio signal, in order to be reproduced by an electrical-to-sound pressure transducer (aka 'a speaker') of some sort, so that the sound-pressure-to-neural impulse transducers in the human body (aka 'your ears') can PERCEIVE IT. There's literally no way around it. Even if, in some totally dystopian future, where you can ONLY use 'approved' digital-input-only speakers and headphones (that of course they put anti-tampering in, so if you open or attempt to modify them, they self-destruct) it still has to produce sound waves in the air so you can hear it! What else would they do? Digital-only DRM microphones, that communicate ultrasonically with digital-only DRM speakers, and turn themselves off if you're attempting to record from a DRM source? Bull-fucking-shit. Audio professionals would never stand for it, there would be pro-level equipment with no such restrictions. Also there would always be some South Asian company making adapters to get around it, or hackers making their own, or 'illegal' software to strip DRM from audio files.. it would be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, everything would cost orders of magnitude more than it does now -- and nobody would stand for it, and everyone would go bankrupt. It's all utter madness, and it's not going to happen.
Bottom line:
o There will always be baseband analog audio in one form or another.
o You can't 100% prevent someone from recording or otherwise converting DRM'd audio, and it's madness to even TRY.
o People are going to share things whether you want them to or not
o Trying to PREVENT them from doing so is a negative-sum game; don't even try.
o Overly-draconic DRM and copyright schemes just piss people off and make them want to spend LESS money, not MORE.
o Go get your Bluetooth-to-headphone adapter or USB-to-headphone adapter and stop complaining, it's all good.
o Look at it this way: you have an opportunity to get a better DAC this way.
o You're probably better off this way anyway, so many of you manage to break your headphone jacks, this way the replacement is quick and easy.
As someone else said: one direction this could go, is that ANY traffic that isn't sent in the clear could be classified as some sort of copyright infringement. That would even include https:/// traffic, since technically an ISP is not supposed to be snooping on that; under current laws they would be committing a cybercrime if they did. Also anyone using TOR or any other onion-routing network would have to be considered potentially infringing on someone's copyright, since it's encrypted and therefore they would have to assume that it's something illegal. Add to this the well-known fact that technology-ignorant (or just power-hungry; you be the judge) politicians, government officials, and law enforcement all would love it if all encryption was outlawed (except, of course, for them, and doubtlessly the rich 1%, who will have 'exemptions' because they're 'important' or somesuch bullshit; but I diverge..) and everything was sent in the clear -- even banking transactions, I'm sure, since they want to know where every penny you have is going (you might be funding terrorism, or buying something illegal!), all of which would essentially make the Internet completely unusable for any serious purposes; after that point only a fool would use it for anything, knowing that every single byte that goes in or out would be sifted and analyzed even worse than it is right now..
Nope, nope, nope.. 'Rightscorp' needs to be destroyed, completely erradicated; they are part of the Cancer that is killing the Internet; they are why we can't have nice things. Them, them, fuck them. ISPs should not be part of law enforcement. ISPs may be the gateway to the Internet, but they should not be the GATEKEEPERS.
I prefer to characterize it as a player-versus player game of whack-a-mole.
Facebook will 'still be a thing' for another couple years before it goes the way of AOL, Myspace, and Livejournal -- and I'll cheer when it does, because Facebook is flat-out evil as well as fucking stupid. I'll point and laugh at Zuckerberg as he peddles pencils on streetcorners to get enough money for his daily forty-ouncer.
..but I digress from why I'm commenting. Let me tell you what's going to happen: Facebook will change it's Terms of Service to specifically prohibit using an adblocker of any kind; that's the nuclear bomb they'll drop, and it'll be a true doomsday device for everyone: people will leave Facebook in droves, and Facebook will be over. What we're seeing today, with this player-versus-player game of whack-a-mole is just the opening volleys of the Ad War. The only other 'nuclear option' I can think of, is that Facebook starts charging a subscription fee if you don't want to see ads -- which will likewise kill off Facebook for good. It's inevitable: The Facebook Doomsday Clock is ticking, and it's at one minute to midnight right now. Bye bye, Facebook; and nothing of value will have been lost.