The DMA's website has a
webform for commenting on the proposed do-not-call rule. They helpfully pre-fill in an editor window with a suggested letter.
I cut the suggested text, replaced it with "As a harassed citizen, I strongly support the proposed national do-not-call database. The DMA can go to hell", signed it and submitted it.
Twenty years ago, when dd was already a decade old, hard disk drives still had hardware write protect switches. They've gotten increasingly scarce since then.
So hey, I like Linux as much as the next guy, but I always get a little nervous when I use dd to copy a disk. I'll stare at the command for a good ten seconds before hitting "enter".
Can you imagine being the FBI agent who has to explain how he typed dd of=/dev/hda1 if=/dev/hdc1 when he really meant dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdc1 -- and/dev/hda just happens to be the suspect's original drive?
A while ago I got tired of swapping DAT tapes during full backups of ever-bigger disk drives, and of having to minimize my use of the system while they ran. I also got pretty tired of repeated hard drive failures, as I had purchased a couple of those jinxed IBM hard drives made in Hungary.
So after a brief look at hardware RAID I realized that the software RAID support in Linux was all I really needed. Since this is my own machine, I didn't really need the hot-swap capability of a hardware RAID controller.
I bought two 100GB Western Digital drives and set them up in a RAID-1 configuration. A month later, I bought another drive, replaced one of the drives in the machine with it, and put the removed drive in the safe. A month after that, I bought another drive and repeated the process, this time moving the drive in the safe to an off-site location.
Every month or so I repeat the process, rotating the second drive of the array through my various offline storage locations. The real beauty of this (especially vs tape) is that I only need enough downtime to swap the drives and reboot the system; the mirror reconstruction runs in the background as I use the system normally.
The use of RAID-1 gives me complete protection against data loss in the event one of the online drives fails (though I've had no failures yet with the WD drives). If both drives are somehow ruined (e.g., by a fire within the computer), or if I accidentally delete something important, I have my first offline backup, less than a month old. If that's also ruined (e.g., my whole house burns down and the fire-rated safe fails to protect the drives it contains) I have my off-site drive, which is less than 2 months old. Obviously I could easily extend this process with more drives and more offsite storage locations.
Because the backup drives are regularly rotated into online service, bearing stiction should be less likely to occur. And if an offline drive were to fail when I bring it back into service, so what? It was about to get overwritten anyway.
Naturally, I also continually back up especially important files (e.g., email, work projects, documents, etc) to various machines over the network, as that's the easiest and most effective way to protect small amounts of data. But when it comes to periodic full backups of big disks, nowadays I just don't see any practical alternative to disk-to-disk copying. And RAID-1 is the easiest way to do that copying.
No, I'm perfectly serious. Medical researchers have been trying for decades to get the message out to the public and their representatives about the consequences of antibiotic misuse and overuse. But the only way they can explain their warnings is to invoke basic evolutionary principles.
Only evolution clearly explains how and why the widespread use of antibiotics causes the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria: the presence of an antibiotic causes natural selection to begin selecting for strains of bacteria that are resistant to that antibiotic. Pretty soon that antibiotic stops working.
But as soon as most people (and legislators) hear the "e-word", they stop listening. They know (because their preachers have said so) that evolution is a wicked falsity concocted by a bunch of atheistic scientists. So if the scientists have to invoke evolution to argue for more selective antibiotic use, then their warnings are obviously bogus!
This is just one example of how widespread scientific illiteracy seriously affects public policy. We all lose.
The development of antibiotic resistance by bacteria is one of the most important examples of evolution in action. Yet when so many people deny the reality of evolution because of religious superstitions, how can they be made to understand the dangers of antibiotic overuse?
130 dB SPL is 10 dB above the threshold of pain! Seems to me that if that figure were real, the other orchestra musicians sitting in front of the horns would have serious permanent hearing loss after only one piece.
Also, I don't think very many symphonic orchestras are miked only 1 m from the trumpets and cornets.
That said, I suppose it's conceivable that some orchestras in some really quiet studios with some really good microphones and preamps do, on rare occasions, exhibit dynamic ranges somewhat in excess of 96dB. I certainly can't hear that in my living room, and I'm not prepared to pay twice for my recordings to hear it.
I have yet to hear a classical recording where the microphone preamp hiss and ambient noise (air conditioning, etc) doesn't significantly exceed the quantizing noise floor of 16-bit PCM.
As for designing steep filters, that's quite easy to do digitally with oversampled A/D converters. That's why this technique is so popular.
Yes. Phosphorus, more specifically *white* phosphorus (P4) is the most likely candidate for being kept under water. This keeps it from slowly oxidizing on its own in air. When it does this, it glows in the dark; hence its name. It can also ignite spontaneously from the generated heat. Then it oxidizes real fast.
The other allotropes of elemental phosphorus are red (polymerized white phosphorus) and black. They are not nearly as reactive or as poisonous as white phosphorus.
Water does not resonate at 2.4 GHz. That's a very common misconception based on the fact that microwave ovens operate there, and they heat water.
Water does have resonances, but at much higher frequencies. There's a moderate water vapor resonance at 22 GHz and a much stronger one at 183 GHz.
Water is a polar molecule, so an alternating electric field at any frequency will tend to jerk it around and heat it up. In the low microwave range, the higher the frequency the more effectively water absorbs RF, which is why Ku-band satellites at 11-12 GHz are more affected by rain than C-band satellites at 4 GHz. So 2.4 GHz is actually less affected by water than many higher frequencies used for communications through the atmosphere.
So why not use the actual water resonance frequencies in microwave ovens? One, tradition: 2.4 GHz is an FCC allocation for Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) devices, including ovens. Two, 2.4 GHz magnetrons are cheap and reasonably efficient. Three, higher frequencies would be harder to contain; seals, seams, screen holes and the like would be proportionately larger at higher frequencies. Four, you don't want to use a resonant frequency, as that would only heat the outer layer of the food, leaving the inside cold and raw!
This is actually not a bad idea. Traditionally, fuel cells have a low power-to-weight ratio, much lower than rechargeable batteries. Most of the work done on fuel cells in recent years has been to increase their power/weight ratio to something that can provide reasonable acceleration in a car. You generally do this by increasing the reaction area, but you have to do it without spending too much money on expensive catalysts like platinum.
So this does suggest the possibility of a hybrid battery/fuel cell car where the fuel cell need only handle the car's average cruising power needs, while the battery is used for acceleration, hill climbing and regenerative braking. A reasonably efficient EV uses less than 10 kW to cruise at freeway speeds on level ground, while over 100 kW may be used during maximum acceleration.
Also, if the battery is reasonably large then it can provide all of the energy required for short trips around town. It can then be recharged from stationary sources without having to operate the fuel cell at all. This would be the best of both worlds. On short trips, you'd benefit from the greater efficiency and source diversity of large stationary power plants, and you'd never have to go to a fueling station. On longer trips, you'd have the greater range and quick refueling features of the fuel cell.
This is my chief objection to the hybrid cars now on their market; their batteries are too small to provide any significant electric-only range even on short trips, and there is no way to charge them from external electricity sources.
The infrastructure for electric vehicles is actually even more pervasive than for gasoline. How many US homes lack electric service?
As an EV1 driver for over four years, it is difficult to overstate the convenience of never having to go to a gas station to refuel. I charge my car in the two places it already spends most of its time parked: at home, and at work. That covers all of my routine charging needs. When I use public charging, it's usually to get the good parking spot, or just to see if the charger still works (I maintain a web directory of local public charging sites.)
It is true that most commercially produced EVs, both inductive and conductive, require special external boxes and cables that are usually mounted in fixed locations. However, the conductive box is really just an adapter, and you can carry one to make use of a random 240V outlet in an emergency. A dryer or range outlet will work, as will the 240V outlets in most RV parks. Although this is technically against code, being able to use these outlets fairly easily is one of the major advantages of conductive charging. It's also possible to carry an inductive charger (I've done it) but they're much larger, heavier and more expensive.
Many EVs also allow charging from conventional 120V outlets, although more slowly than at 240V. So in this sense, EV charging stations are already everywhere.
The inductive charging situation is even worse than that. Some years ago, GM talked Toyota into adopting inductive charging. Toyota imposed a condition: a new, smaller paddle would replace the original large paddle used on the EV1 and S-10 and become the inductive charging standard.
The new small paddle fits into large (EV1 and S-10) cars with a simple adapter, but the older large-paddle chargers are useless with the Toyota RAV4EV, the most common EV with a small-paddle receptacle.
GM was in the process of retrofitting all the public large-paddle chargers with small-paddle units when the California Air Resources Board decided to make conductive charging the California EV standard (the right decision, IHMO). In a snit, GM abruptly took all its marbles and went home. They stopped leasing EV1s and stopped replacing large paddle chargers with small paddle chargers.
So when the last EV1 leases are up, we'll be left with a whole bunch of large-paddle public chargers that the Toyota RAV4EV, the only inductively-charged EV still on the market, will be unable to use.
The poor RAV4EV drivers get the worst of both worlds: an expensive, inefficient and unreliable inductive charging system without even the benefit of the many public charging stations that we EV1 drivers have.
Inductive EV charging was a worthwhile experiment, but it was a failure. The sooner we junk it and move to conductive, the better.
So let's say you're a terrorist interested in information about bombs. And you know the government can easily read your library records. What do you do?
You do what nearly every other library user does these days. You go to the photocopier, drop in a few coins, and copy just the few pages you want. No records are kept, and there's no need to return anything when you're done.
So what's next? A law mandating libraries to require ID for photocopier use, and to keep copies of every copy a machine makes? Before you laugh, consider that many newer copiers already consist of scanners connected to laser printers, so quietly keeping a copy of everything passed through the machine wouldn't be hard at all.
When my wife and I planned our wedding, we had to fire the first photographer we hired because she simply wouldn't agree to give us the copyright to the photos we were going to pay her good money to take.
We found another professional photographer. Not only was he entirely willing to give us the negatives and all rights, but was a much easier guy to work with.
Very good point. I guess there's just no way to preclude coercion without having the voter physically go to a place where voting privacy can be enforced.
Question: do polling places require that voters enter the booths alone, even if the voter claims that the person is there at his/her request? What about people who say they need assistance in voting? These still present opportunities for coercion.
How about this approach to electronic voting: when the "polls" close, the election commissioner archives all the electronic ballots, digitally signs the resulting tarball, and publishes it. Then anyone who wants to verify the tally can do so from wholly public data.
To protect privacy, each ballot is identified by a single-use, random identifier known only to the voter. That way each voter can personally verify from the public data that his or her own votes were correctly recorded.
I found your credulous article on the Tilley electric Delorean most
discouraging, for two reasons.
First, it demonstrates the utter failure of science education in this
country. Even most journalists, who are generally more literate than
most people, suffer from near-total scientific illiteracy. Our
civilization is heavily dependent on science and technology, and wise
public policy making demands that everyone in our society have a clear
understanding of at least the basics.
Second, it gives real electric vehicles (the ones that don't violate
the laws of physics) a bad name.
In researching your story, you could have dusted off your physics
textbooks and explained the laws of thermodynamics in simple layman's
terms: when it comes to energy, you can't get something from nothing.
I know that journalists are trained to get and present both sides of a
story. That's a laudable policy when covering politics. But when it
comes to well established physical laws, not every opinion is equally
valid.
I hear that the test at track didn't go well. Pardon me if I'm not too
astonished. Supposedly the problem was a broken wheel bearing. Right.
Why don't you do some real investigative journalism and expose this
fraud for what it is?
As for real electric vehicles, I've been driving the GM EV1 for over
four years. Since I don't have Tilley's magic box, I have to charge
it regularly. Yet I still find it entirely practical and useful. Too
bad most readers of your story will treat Tilley's failure as further
evidence that all electric vehicles are necessarily doomed to
failure.
Quite right. Anyone familiar with lead-acid batteries has seen the voltage recovery that occurs when you remove a heavy load.
When you put a heavy load on the battery, the sulfuric acid in contact with the plates is consumed in the reaction and the local acid concentration drops. When you remove the load, fresh acid has a chance to diffuse in from the rest of the electrolyte, and the terminal voltage recovers -- though not to its original fully charged level.
As pointed out by others, this voltage recovery does not indicate that the battery is somehow recharging itself. It's just a manifestation of the fact that the battery cannot be discharged instantaneously.
Obviously Tilley is either unfamiliar with lead acid batteries, or he's being deliberately disengenuous.
Demand metering is very common, and I wouldn't be surprised if your utility also offers it on residential property.
I don't know about Arizona, but in all the places I've lived (Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California), demand metering is a strictly commercial phenomenon. It's just not part of most residential tariffs.
Are you sure you're talking about demand metering, not time-of-use metering? TOU is optionally available in many residential tariffs, though the extra cost of the meter makes it uneconomical for most people. I have a TOU meter because of my EV1, which I can choose to charge at off-peak times.
That said, I still think the best answer is continuous, real-time pricing for all customers, residential and commercial. The lack of such mechanisms is one of the reasons that electricity deregulation failed in California. It also contributed to several rolling blackouts, as there was little incentive besides altruism for individuals to conserve during Stage 2 alerts.
Real-time pricing would not only encourage the construction of PV (since, as I've pointed out, most PV power is generated during peak-rate periods) but it would also encourage those with battery banks to sell from those banks when things get really critical. I've done this on an experimental basis, but without a price premium high enough to cover battery depreciation as well as various losses, there's no economic incentive for me to help out the grid in its time of need.
I think that a subsidy is a subsidy, and in general I oppose such things. A subsidy means that politicians think they know a better way to do something than the market does, and history shows that this is rarely the case
In theory, I agree with you. But in practice, the market is seldom as efficient or as perfect as many free-market champions say it is. And in those situations, some sort of government intervention is both necessary and desirable.
Electricity is a perfect example. There are serious land-use issues associated with transmission lines, and serious environmental issues associated with power plants. Even libertarians generally agree that it's appropriate for governments to regulate pollution, e.g., by encouraging the construction of cleaner power plants than would otherwise come about by just the action of the market.
Rooftop PV is about the most benign way to generate electricity there is. The "fuel" is free and effectively infinite, and PV panels mounted on existing rooftops require no additional land. Rooftop PV power is generated right at (or close to) where it is needed, thus reducing the need to build additional transmission facilities. It is clearly something worth encouraging.
Now we can certainly discuss the various ways to do that, ranging from direct subsidies (e.g., California's "buy-down" program), to production incentives (e.g., preferential rates for PV production), to levying additional taxes or restrictions on the less benign methods of generating electricity to account for their environmental impact.
But it's just not realistic to assert that PV "doesn't make economic sense" when you haven't accounted for the serious indirect costs of most of the traditional ways to generate electricity.
My comment on the reverse metering is that it is an unreasonable subsidy for your power. One could argue, as you do, that it is reasonable to jumpstart a better energy source, and you may be right. But the power you feed back to the utility definitely isn't worth as much as you get paid for it, because they cannot control it or count on it. Thus they have to build peak load and transmission capacity as if the photovoltaics weren't there at all (in fact, this in general is a problem with photovoltaics - outside of energy efficiency which I'll tentatively grant you).
I'll grant you this point provided that you grant me mine that under the present circumstances (net-metered PV and wind production is a tiny fraction of grid capacity) net metering is not an unreasonable subsidy -- and not just because the amounts are small. Consider that a sudden decrease of 1kW in my PV production (due to a cloud, etc) is indistinguishable from a sudden 1kW increase in my -- or my neighbors' -- demand. Yet the power company is quite capable of adapting to such small changes in demand, charging only for the electricity we actually use, and not charging us for the electricity we don't use. They don't apply "demand" charges to us residential customers as they do to large commercial customers.
Only when net-metered generation starts to represent a significant fraction of generating capacity should the current net metering policy be revisited. And the right answer then will not be to eliminate net metering, but to add real-time pricing. I can still generate electricity (or not) whenever I want, but the price I'll be paid for it will depend on the current supply/demand situation. Generators able to provide electricity whenever it is needed will, on average, command higher prices than "unreliable" sources that can't.
But I still expect PV generation to command above-average prices simply because it generally occurs when demand is highest, i.e., on hot sunny summer afternoons.
A long time later, when nearly all of our daytime needs are being met with PV generation, the daytime price will fall to where additional PV capacity won't make economic sense. The market will then encourage the building of generator (or storage) capacity that can meet nighttime loads. Here I agree that nuclear represents the best technology currently known, although I wouldn't completely discount battery storage. Large sodium-sulfur batteries are already being used in utility load leveling applications.
When discussing energy and related topics (e.g., electric cars) people often fall into the trap of arguing that just because some new technology can't meet all our needs, it has no value and shouldn't be pursued at all. This simply isn't true. It's quite easy to see that photovoltaic can never meet all our needs unless we develop inexpensive, reliable, safe and large batteries that can store enough PV energy to run us over night and during cloudy weather. (Either that, or an electric grid able to ship electricity halfway around the planet, from the day side to the night side.) But does this mean PVs shouldn't do what they can? Of course not! Electricity can be generated in many different ways, and it is neither necessary or even desirable to look for a single magic way to generate all of it.
Obviously you dont see longer lasting, environmentaly friendly as advantages.
Well, I would -- if fuel cells were an environmental advantage. I can recharge, at home, a typical Li-ion or NiMH battery hundreds or a few thousand times without throwing anything away. When the battery reaches end-of-life, I can still recycle it.
Even the discarding of primary batteries isn't much of an environmental threat, now that mercury has been removed.
As for rechargable...either you bring them back to the store (like empty bottles, your full celluloid-ish camera roll etc), or 'they' will bring out a home-recharge kit.
You mean, just like inkjet printer cartridges? The ones that now contain little chips whose sole purpose is to keep you from refilling them inexpensively at home, forcing you to discard them and buy expensive new ones?
But then again, I bet you fill up your car with petrol at home, too.
Actually, no. I fill up my car with electricity at home. It's a GM EV1 electric.
It is precisely the convenience of being able to "refuel" my car at home or work without having to physically go anywhere to purchase a material substance that made me realize how much less convenient a fuel cell -- for cars or for consumer electronics -- would be than rechargeable batteries, and to wonder why they are touted so much as the "ultimate solution".
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I cut the suggested text, replaced it with "As a harassed citizen, I strongly support the proposed national do-not-call database. The DMA can go to hell", signed it and submitted it.
Phil
So hey, I like Linux as much as the next guy, but I always get a little nervous when I use dd to copy a disk. I'll stare at the command for a good ten seconds before hitting "enter".
Can you imagine being the FBI agent who has to explain how he typed dd of=/dev/hda1 if=/dev/hdc1 when he really meant dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdc1 -- and /dev/hda just happens to be the suspect's original drive?
So after a brief look at hardware RAID I realized that the software RAID support in Linux was all I really needed. Since this is my own machine, I didn't really need the hot-swap capability of a hardware RAID controller.
I bought two 100GB Western Digital drives and set them up in a RAID-1 configuration. A month later, I bought another drive, replaced one of the drives in the machine with it, and put the removed drive in the safe. A month after that, I bought another drive and repeated the process, this time moving the drive in the safe to an off-site location.
Every month or so I repeat the process, rotating the second drive of the array through my various offline storage locations. The real beauty of this (especially vs tape) is that I only need enough downtime to swap the drives and reboot the system; the mirror reconstruction runs in the background as I use the system normally.
The use of RAID-1 gives me complete protection against data loss in the event one of the online drives fails (though I've had no failures yet with the WD drives). If both drives are somehow ruined (e.g., by a fire within the computer), or if I accidentally delete something important, I have my first offline backup, less than a month old. If that's also ruined (e.g., my whole house burns down and the fire-rated safe fails to protect the drives it contains) I have my off-site drive, which is less than 2 months old. Obviously I could easily extend this process with more drives and more offsite storage locations.
Because the backup drives are regularly rotated into online service, bearing stiction should be less likely to occur. And if an offline drive were to fail when I bring it back into service, so what? It was about to get overwritten anyway.
Naturally, I also continually back up especially important files (e.g., email, work projects, documents, etc) to various machines over the network, as that's the easiest and most effective way to protect small amounts of data. But when it comes to periodic full backups of big disks, nowadays I just don't see any practical alternative to disk-to-disk copying. And RAID-1 is the easiest way to do that copying.
Only evolution clearly explains how and why the widespread use of antibiotics causes the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria: the presence of an antibiotic causes natural selection to begin selecting for strains of bacteria that are resistant to that antibiotic. Pretty soon that antibiotic stops working.
But as soon as most people (and legislators) hear the "e-word", they stop listening. They know (because their preachers have said so) that evolution is a wicked falsity concocted by a bunch of atheistic scientists. So if the scientists have to invoke evolution to argue for more selective antibiotic use, then their warnings are obviously bogus!
This is just one example of how widespread scientific illiteracy seriously affects public policy. We all lose.
The development of antibiotic resistance by bacteria is one of the most important examples of evolution in action. Yet when so many people deny the reality of evolution because of religious superstitions, how can they be made to understand the dangers of antibiotic overuse?
Babelfish won't translate this unless you insert some spaces in the German. So I entered
Scheiß etwas wirklich schlechtesgeschehenundesüberraschtemichgroß
and got this English translation:
Shit somewhat really bad-happen-and-surprise-me-largely
Roadrunner dumped their proprietary login client years ago. At least they did here in San Diego, and I'm pretty sure it was done nationally.
Also, I don't think very many symphonic orchestras are miked only 1 m from the trumpets and cornets.
That said, I suppose it's conceivable that some orchestras in some really quiet studios with some really good microphones and preamps do, on rare occasions, exhibit dynamic ranges somewhat in excess of 96dB. I certainly can't hear that in my living room, and I'm not prepared to pay twice for my recordings to hear it.
I have yet to hear a classical recording where the microphone preamp hiss and ambient noise (air conditioning, etc) doesn't significantly exceed the quantizing noise floor of 16-bit PCM.
As for designing steep filters, that's quite easy to do digitally with oversampled A/D converters. That's why this technique is so popular.
Are you sure? Acetylene is pretty explosive when compressed, even when not mixed with oxygen. There's a lot of energy in that triple C-C bond.
That's why acetylene tanks do not contain compressed gas, but rather acetylene dissolved in acetone.
Yes. Phosphorus, more specifically *white* phosphorus (P4) is the most likely candidate for being kept under water. This keeps it from slowly oxidizing on its own in air. When it does this, it glows in the dark; hence its name. It can also ignite spontaneously from the generated heat. Then it oxidizes real fast.
The other allotropes of elemental phosphorus are red (polymerized white phosphorus) and black. They are not nearly as reactive or as poisonous as white phosphorus.
Water does have resonances, but at much higher frequencies. There's a moderate water vapor resonance at 22 GHz and a much stronger one at 183 GHz.
Water is a polar molecule, so an alternating electric field at any frequency will tend to jerk it around and heat it up. In the low microwave range, the higher the frequency the more effectively water absorbs RF, which is why Ku-band satellites at 11-12 GHz are more affected by rain than C-band satellites at 4 GHz. So 2.4 GHz is actually less affected by water than many higher frequencies used for communications through the atmosphere.
So why not use the actual water resonance frequencies in microwave ovens? One, tradition: 2.4 GHz is an FCC allocation for Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) devices, including ovens. Two, 2.4 GHz magnetrons are cheap and reasonably efficient. Three, higher frequencies would be harder to contain; seals, seams, screen holes and the like would be proportionately larger at higher frequencies. Four, you don't want to use a resonant frequency, as that would only heat the outer layer of the food, leaving the inside cold and raw!
This is actually not a bad idea. Traditionally, fuel cells have a low power-to-weight ratio, much lower than rechargeable batteries. Most of the work done on fuel cells in recent years has been to increase their power/weight ratio to something that can provide reasonable acceleration in a car. You generally do this by increasing the reaction area, but you have to do it without spending too much money on expensive catalysts like platinum.
So this does suggest the possibility of a hybrid battery/fuel cell car where the fuel cell need only handle the car's average cruising power needs, while the battery is used for acceleration, hill climbing and regenerative braking. A reasonably efficient EV uses less than 10 kW to cruise at freeway speeds on level ground, while over 100 kW may be used during maximum acceleration.
Also, if the battery is reasonably large then it can provide all of the energy required for short trips around town. It can then be recharged from stationary sources without having to operate the fuel cell at all. This would be the best of both worlds. On short trips, you'd benefit from the greater efficiency and source diversity of large stationary power plants, and you'd never have to go to a fueling station. On longer trips, you'd have the greater range and quick refueling features of the fuel cell.
This is my chief objection to the hybrid cars now on their market; their batteries are too small to provide any significant electric-only range even on short trips, and there is no way to charge them from external electricity sources.
The infrastructure for electric vehicles is actually even more pervasive than for gasoline. How many US homes lack electric service?
As an EV1 driver for over four years, it is difficult to overstate the convenience of never having to go to a gas station to refuel. I charge my car in the two places it already spends most of its time parked: at home, and at work. That covers all of my routine charging needs. When I use public charging, it's usually to get the good parking spot, or just to see if the charger still works (I maintain a web directory of local public charging sites.)
It is true that most commercially produced EVs, both inductive and conductive, require special external boxes and cables that are usually mounted in fixed locations. However, the conductive box is really just an adapter, and you can carry one to make use of a random 240V outlet in an emergency. A dryer or range outlet will work, as will the 240V outlets in most RV parks. Although this is technically against code, being able to use these outlets fairly easily is one of the major advantages of conductive charging. It's also possible to carry an inductive charger (I've done it) but they're much larger, heavier and more expensive.
Many EVs also allow charging from conventional 120V outlets, although more slowly than at 240V. So in this sense, EV charging stations are already everywhere.
The inductive charging situation is even worse than that. Some years ago, GM talked Toyota into adopting inductive charging. Toyota imposed a condition: a new, smaller paddle would replace the original large paddle used on the EV1 and S-10 and become the inductive charging standard.
The new small paddle fits into large (EV1 and S-10) cars with a simple adapter, but the older large-paddle chargers are useless with the Toyota RAV4EV, the most common EV with a small-paddle receptacle.
GM was in the process of retrofitting all the public large-paddle chargers with small-paddle units when the California Air Resources Board decided to make conductive charging the California EV standard (the right decision, IHMO). In a snit, GM abruptly took all its marbles and went home. They stopped leasing EV1s and stopped replacing large paddle chargers with small paddle chargers.
So when the last EV1 leases are up, we'll be left with a whole bunch of large-paddle public chargers that the Toyota RAV4EV, the only inductively-charged EV still on the market, will be unable to use.
The poor RAV4EV drivers get the worst of both worlds: an expensive, inefficient and unreliable inductive charging system without even the benefit of the many public charging stations that we EV1 drivers have.
Inductive EV charging was a worthwhile experiment, but it was a failure. The sooner we junk it and move to conductive, the better.
So let's say you're a terrorist interested in information about bombs. And you know the government can easily read your library records. What do you do?
You do what nearly every other library user does these days. You go to the photocopier, drop in a few coins, and copy just the few pages you want. No records are kept, and there's no need to return anything when you're done.
So what's next? A law mandating libraries to require ID for photocopier use, and to keep copies of every copy a machine makes? Before you laugh, consider that many newer copiers already consist of scanners connected to laser printers, so quietly keeping a copy of everything passed through the machine wouldn't be hard at all.
We found another professional photographer. Not only was he entirely willing to give us the negatives and all rights, but was a much easier guy to work with.
Moral: shop around. It's your money.
Question: do polling places require that voters enter the booths alone, even if the voter claims that the person is there at his/her request? What about people who say they need assistance in voting? These still present opportunities for coercion.
To protect privacy, each ballot is identified by a single-use, random identifier known only to the voter. That way each voter can personally verify from the public data that his or her own votes were correctly recorded.
I found your credulous article on the Tilley electric Delorean most discouraging, for two reasons.
First, it demonstrates the utter failure of science education in this country. Even most journalists, who are generally more literate than most people, suffer from near-total scientific illiteracy. Our civilization is heavily dependent on science and technology, and wise public policy making demands that everyone in our society have a clear understanding of at least the basics.
Second, it gives real electric vehicles (the ones that don't violate the laws of physics) a bad name.
In researching your story, you could have dusted off your physics textbooks and explained the laws of thermodynamics in simple layman's terms: when it comes to energy, you can't get something from nothing.
I know that journalists are trained to get and present both sides of a story. That's a laudable policy when covering politics. But when it comes to well established physical laws, not every opinion is equally valid.
I hear that the test at track didn't go well. Pardon me if I'm not too astonished. Supposedly the problem was a broken wheel bearing. Right. Why don't you do some real investigative journalism and expose this fraud for what it is?
As for real electric vehicles, I've been driving the GM EV1 for over four years. Since I don't have Tilley's magic box, I have to charge it regularly. Yet I still find it entirely practical and useful. Too bad most readers of your story will treat Tilley's failure as further evidence that all electric vehicles are necessarily doomed to failure.
Phil Karn
When you put a heavy load on the battery, the sulfuric acid in contact with the plates is consumed in the reaction and the local acid concentration drops. When you remove the load, fresh acid has a chance to diffuse in from the rest of the electrolyte, and the terminal voltage recovers -- though not to its original fully charged level.
As pointed out by others, this voltage recovery does not indicate that the battery is somehow recharging itself. It's just a manifestation of the fact that the battery cannot be discharged instantaneously.
Obviously Tilley is either unfamiliar with lead acid batteries, or he's being deliberately disengenuous.
I don't know about Arizona, but in all the places I've lived (Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California), demand metering is a strictly commercial phenomenon. It's just not part of most residential tariffs.
Are you sure you're talking about demand metering, not time-of-use metering? TOU is optionally available in many residential tariffs, though the extra cost of the meter makes it uneconomical for most people. I have a TOU meter because of my EV1, which I can choose to charge at off-peak times.
That said, I still think the best answer is continuous, real-time pricing for all customers, residential and commercial. The lack of such mechanisms is one of the reasons that electricity deregulation failed in California. It also contributed to several rolling blackouts, as there was little incentive besides altruism for individuals to conserve during Stage 2 alerts.
Real-time pricing would not only encourage the construction of PV (since, as I've pointed out, most PV power is generated during peak-rate periods) but it would also encourage those with battery banks to sell from those banks when things get really critical. I've done this on an experimental basis, but without a price premium high enough to cover battery depreciation as well as various losses, there's no economic incentive for me to help out the grid in its time of need.
Electricity is a perfect example. There are serious land-use issues associated with transmission lines, and serious environmental issues associated with power plants. Even libertarians generally agree that it's appropriate for governments to regulate pollution, e.g., by encouraging the construction of cleaner power plants than would otherwise come about by just the action of the market.
Rooftop PV is about the most benign way to generate electricity there is. The "fuel" is free and effectively infinite, and PV panels mounted on existing rooftops require no additional land. Rooftop PV power is generated right at (or close to) where it is needed, thus reducing the need to build additional transmission facilities. It is clearly something worth encouraging.
Now we can certainly discuss the various ways to do that, ranging from direct subsidies (e.g., California's "buy-down" program), to production incentives (e.g., preferential rates for PV production), to levying additional taxes or restrictions on the less benign methods of generating electricity to account for their environmental impact.
But it's just not realistic to assert that PV "doesn't make economic sense" when you haven't accounted for the serious indirect costs of most of the traditional ways to generate electricity.
I'll grant you this point provided that you grant me mine that under the present circumstances (net-metered PV and wind production is a tiny fraction of grid capacity) net metering is not an unreasonable subsidy -- and not just because the amounts are small. Consider that a sudden decrease of 1kW in my PV production (due to a cloud, etc) is indistinguishable from a sudden 1kW increase in my -- or my neighbors' -- demand. Yet the power company is quite capable of adapting to such small changes in demand, charging only for the electricity we actually use, and not charging us for the electricity we don't use. They don't apply "demand" charges to us residential customers as they do to large commercial customers.
Only when net-metered generation starts to represent a significant fraction of generating capacity should the current net metering policy be revisited. And the right answer then will not be to eliminate net metering, but to add real-time pricing. I can still generate electricity (or not) whenever I want, but the price I'll be paid for it will depend on the current supply/demand situation. Generators able to provide electricity whenever it is needed will, on average, command higher prices than "unreliable" sources that can't.
But I still expect PV generation to command above-average prices simply because it generally occurs when demand is highest, i.e., on hot sunny summer afternoons.
A long time later, when nearly all of our daytime needs are being met with PV generation, the daytime price will fall to where additional PV capacity won't make economic sense. The market will then encourage the building of generator (or storage) capacity that can meet nighttime loads. Here I agree that nuclear represents the best technology currently known, although I wouldn't completely discount battery storage. Large sodium-sulfur batteries are already being used in utility load leveling applications.
When discussing energy and related topics (e.g., electric cars) people often fall into the trap of arguing that just because some new technology can't meet all our needs, it has no value and shouldn't be pursued at all. This simply isn't true. It's quite easy to see that photovoltaic can never meet all our needs unless we develop inexpensive, reliable, safe and large batteries that can store enough PV energy to run us over night and during cloudy weather. (Either that, or an electric grid able to ship electricity halfway around the planet, from the day side to the night side.) But does this mean PVs shouldn't do what they can? Of course not! Electricity can be generated in many different ways, and it is neither necessary or even desirable to look for a single magic way to generate all of it.
Even the discarding of primary batteries isn't much of an environmental threat, now that mercury has been removed.
You mean, just like inkjet printer cartridges? The ones that now contain little chips whose sole purpose is to keep you from refilling them inexpensively at home, forcing you to discard them and buy expensive new ones? Actually, no. I fill up my car with electricity at home. It's a GM EV1 electric.It is precisely the convenience of being able to "refuel" my car at home or work without having to physically go anywhere to purchase a material substance that made me realize how much less convenient a fuel cell -- for cars or for consumer electronics -- would be than rechargeable batteries, and to wonder why they are touted so much as the "ultimate solution".