And what's to say that electricity prices won't jump up dramatically with people suddenly charging their cars on the grid every day?
That could happen; on the other hand, gas prices could jump up dramatically instead. In fact, increases in gas prices are pretty much inevitable as gas becomes scarcer, whereas electric prices are likely to decrease as we get better at producing power from various renewable sources. In the worst case, you could always put up your own rooftop PV array to power your car; it's much easier than digging your own oil well...
Have you actually driven a hybrid? They shut off the air to conserve power and reduce petrol consumption.
Are you sure? I drove a Prius last week, and I didn't notice that. I did notice that when I had the A/C on my MPG was much lower (e.g. 28MPG instead of 50MPG), and that the engine stayed on more often, but I never saw the A/C automaticallly shut itself off. That would be a strange thing for it to do, since it would be contradicting the user's wishes.
According to GM, I guess if I never go on longer trips, my Volt will be getting infinity miles per gallon.
You haven't taken into account GM's secret plan: recall all of the Volts after a year or two, crush them into cubes, and go back to selling 11MPG SUVs. That will guarantee that no Volt uses any gasoline at all after 2012, and therefore the Volts will all have infinite miles per gallon (as they are transported to the scrap yard).
One case a colleague of mine involved the usual defense of "a trojan did it"
I'm rather surprised trojans don't do it more often. It seems like a pretty viable extortion scheme:
Infect victim's PC
Download loads of kiddy porn to various places on the PC
Email the victim: "ILLEGAL CHILD PORNOGRAPHY DETECTED ON YOUR PC at C:\WINDOWS\KIDDYPORN AND OTHER LOCATIONS. Send us $100 to purchase cleanup tool within 5 days, or the police will be notified"
Wait 5 days, collect money from victim, or if no money, send an 'anonymous tip' to the police
But a dog does not have near-human intelligence. It doesn't even have remotely human intelligence -- it has simply learned behaviors that we can understand and manipulate to a far greater degree than other animals.
The thing is, you could say the same thing about a lot of people as well -- but that doesn't mean they aren't human.
Human intelligence varies greatly from one individual to the next, and so does canine intelligence, and the two ranges overlap somewhat. I won't try to speculate as to what the moral implications of that fact are, but they are probably significant.
Programming in the large isn't about being clever. It's about being unclever, and hence producing maintainable code. That hasn't yet sunk in for our dear Bjarne.
Let's imagine that poor deluded Bjarne follows your advice, sees the light, and realizes that C++ is a complicated mess. What would you have him do at that point? Lobby the C++ committee to strip out all the "difficult" features for the next version of C++, thereby creating a language called "C++" that nevertheless is incompatible with 80% of the C++ code that exists in the world, and guaranteeing that either nobody ever uses the new version, or that the C++ world gets forked into two opposing camps?
Perhaps there is something you haven't realized yet as well -- that "learnability" is far from the only issue to consider when trying to improve a widely-used language. I think Bjarne is well aware of the many trade-offs that have to be made, and he has valid reasons for his decisions. But don't let that interfere with your armchair psychoanalysis.
I would feel better if they were making an AFFORDABLE economical vehicle that would benefit the majority of Americans (and the environment).
Me too, but experience has shown that you can't approach the problem that way. A number of companies have tried make "economical" electric cars, and they end up looking (and driving) like golf carts, while still costing more than, say, a Honda Civic. So when the companies go to sell these cars, the American public just laughs at them, and the companies quickly go out of business. The companies never have a chance to produce a more attractive product, because they never have a chance to establish the manufacturing base necessary to make electric vehicles efficiently, and therefore they can't compete with gas-powered cars.
Tesla is trying to opposite approach: instead of trying to compete with Ford/Honda/Toyota/GM/etc on the low end (an economic suicide mission), they are starting from the high end and working their way down. It turns out that you can make a fairly competitive electric sports-car, because at the high end, pricing is less of an obstacle to consumer acceptance, and therefore you can sell cars even if you have to give them a pretty large markup to offset your startup costs.
Tesla's next step after the Roadster will be to sell the Model S, which will compete with the Mercedes and the BMWs of the world and sell in greater numbers than the niche Roadster product. Assuming the Model S is successful, their next product will be an even more inexpensive model to compete with the Nissans and Hondas of the world. At each step of the way, they leverage the capital and knowledge gained in the previous product to make something that is more mainstream, more cheaply than they previously could have done. In this way, they (hopefully) have a viable path towards making electric cars a popular mass-market product, which is something that you can't say for the electric-car companies that tried things your way and failed.
Who knows whether they will succeed or not, but the plan certainly has its merits.
Making 10,000 unaffordable "green" cars over 10 years has very little environmental impact and not worth my tax dollars in my opinion
That isn't the goal, so your opinion is unfounded.
You're objecting to yourself, and not even aware of it. You may even consider yourself particularly clever because cynicism and negativism pass for intelligence in these degenerate days.
Geez dude, all he said was that there were "issues to consider". Are you proposing that there aren't any issues worth considering? You sound a bit cynical yourself...
but the idea of Everyman being able to charge his electric car in his garage in an hour isn't going to happen anytime soon
I don't think anyone was suggesting that it would happen. Realistically, there would be two choices: Recharge slowly in your garage, overnight (good for local driving), or recharge quickly at a specially equipped recharging station (good for refueling during long trips). The former is more easily achieved than the latter, since garage electrical outlets already exist and super-electric-charging stations don't, but it's possible to build them if we want to.
What's amusing to me is that if you want to education or health care funded in the US, you have to lobby Congress like hell to fund it.
Conversely, if you are the head of the Department of Defense and don't need or want a pointless weapons program, you have to lobby Congress like hell not not fund it.
You've again failed to identify how the land is "destroyed". It will still be largely as livable for the plants and animals of the region as it was previously. But if you're just here to call names, by all means go ahead. I know what a thrill it can be to call everyone who disagrees with you a hypocrite.
Those wind farms really scar the countryside [...] These things destroy hundreds of square miles
What damage, precisely, is done to the countryside? Other than the tweaking of some peoples' overly-developed sense of aesthetics, and a few access roads and power lines, I don't see much damage being done. It's certainly a lot easier on the enviroment than mining, oil drilling, or hydro would be, and it has the added benefit of guaranteeing that no additional development will occur on the land, indefinitely -- i.e. once you've built your wind farm there, the chances of a city/freeway/landfill/etc being built on the same land are slim to none. For any plants/animals that can tolerate the presence of windmills (i.e. most of them), that's not a bad deal.
The issue which motivates us to move to clean energy sources is a buildup of excess thermal energy in the atmosphere. We're trying to reduce the energy in the atmosphere, just to get things back to normal.
I think you have a slight misconception of the problem. It's not the release of heat into the atmosphere that's the problem, it's the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That may sound like almost the same thing, but it's not -- it's the gases that act as a huge blanket, trapping heat in. Without those gases, the extra heat would quickly bleed out into space, as it did before the Industrial Revolution. With those gases present in sufficient quantities, we're still in trouble even if we don't generate any extra heat on the surface -- the heat from the sun will continue to be trapped and heat the earth more than we'd like it to.
To sum up: The release of man-made heat on Earth's surface is not a significant part of the problem. The release of massive quantities CO2 that was previously sequestered underground is the problem.
Very true. So what do you recommend? Going back to manual subsistence farming?
If not, then it's clear we're going to have get our energy from somewhere. Given that and your statement above, it's inevitable that there will be a cost of some sort. The costs we are paying for our current system include: global warming, political instability, and inevitable energy scarcity as fossil fuel resources become depleted. The possibility that the costs of a renewable energy infrastructure would be worse is non-zero, but laughably small... especially when you consider that the costs of a non-renewable system eventually approach infinity as the resources it depends on dwindle to exhaustion.
Am I the only one who gets nervous with this concept?! If the beams are even slightly out you could be frying people rather than generating electricity.
No, you're not the only one; that's the first thing everyone thinks. Personally I blame SimCity. Seriously, don't you think the designers of such a system would have considered that possibility and made damn sure to design it so that "frying people" can't possibly happen? Take 30 seconds to do some research on the subject, you'll see that the proposed systems would be unable to fry anyone.
And you just know the control systems will be conficker infected XP machines with direct access to the Internet:(
You're assuming the system safeguards would be implemented in software -- that would be an insanely poor design. In real life, the hardware would be designed such that "frying people" is literally physically impossible, no matter how badly the control software malfunctions.
There will _always_ be more people. There will _always_ be greater demand for resources
Given a finite amount of resources on earth, the above is clearly false. As resources become more scarce, prices will rise, which will reduce demand. And in the long run, there won't be any more people living on Earth than Earth can support, by definition.
The only question is how to deal with the problem. Conservationists recommend.... conserving resources, so that they will last longer. It's not a difficult position to understand.
Giant carrot people drinking from bottles while playing musical instruments
Curse you, you've discovered the secret! Sorry goffster, but we're going to have to kill you now. We hate to do it, but we can't risk you telling anyone else.
The man's entire presidency was an exercise in law breaking and ass-covering.
Bush didn't see himself as breaking any laws. The way he saw it, as "War President" he wasn't bound by any laws. The ass-covering part was merely an attempt to avoid the hassle of having to explain that to a bunch of naive liberal lawyers who foolishly believed what they were told in civics class.
If it really was that good, then why would they talk about it after they prove the concept first...
You're absolutely right. From now on, all scientific research should be kept completely confidential until they have developed a product that is ready to ship. After all, there's no value to scientific knowledge; the only things worth talking about are consumer products.
Perhaps we can find a way to harness the power of Americans whining about their as-yet-imaginary future energy bills? That would give us a wealth of power for decades.
Seriously guys, nad up. You all sound like Neville Chamberlain whining about how difficult and expensive fighting the Germans is going to be, and how they'll probably go away by themselves if we just continue to ignore them for another couple of years.
You don't even need to do that. Just launch a couple of heavy bricks up into space and de-orbit them on command.
The problem with that approach is that you only get so many "shots" before you have to send up another rocket full of bricks to re-load -- a potentially expensive prospect. The solar-powered laser system, on the other hand, would have the advantage of being usable 24/7/365 forever, without ever having to "reload" it.
The microwave beams here aren't concentrated enough to be useful as any sort of weapon, either purposely or accidental.
True... but out of curiosity, what if someone (say, the military of a well-funded country) wanted to make a solar-powered satellite that could emit a concentrated laser beam instead of a diffuse microwave beam? Is such a thing feasible with existing technology? I can imagine that the ability to light things on fire from space, anywhere on earth, at any time, on a few minute's notice, might be of interest to people with an appropriately Machiavellian mindset...
if everything works perfectly this will be awesome, but nothing ever works perfectly and just the thought of the things that can go wrong scares the hell out of me.
That's just irrational fear of the unfamiliar. The thing everybody immediately imagines is the beam going off-target and frying something. However, that scenario isn't possible, since (a) the beam is diffuse enough that you wouldn't notice it even if it did hit you, and (b) the system can be designed to automatically shut off the beam if the satellite ever goes off-target. (i.e. put a beacon at the center of the target, put a very narrow-field beacon detector on the satellite, if the detector doesn't see the beacon for any reason, it cuts off the microwave beam)
Compared to the risks that we already accept with existing power technologies (e.g. coal slurry floods, war in the middle east, nuclear terrorism, global warming), this system is much safer to operate. Of course its economic viability is a separate issue.
Slashdot Mirror
And what's to say that electricity prices won't jump up dramatically with people suddenly charging their cars on the grid every day?
That could happen; on the other hand, gas prices could jump up dramatically instead. In fact, increases in gas prices are pretty much inevitable as gas becomes scarcer, whereas electric prices are likely to decrease as we get better at producing power from various renewable sources. In the worst case, you could always put up your own rooftop PV array to power your car; it's much easier than digging your own oil well...
Have you actually driven a hybrid? They shut off the air to conserve power and reduce petrol consumption.
Are you sure? I drove a Prius last week, and I didn't notice that. I did notice that when I had the A/C on my MPG was much lower (e.g. 28MPG instead of 50MPG), and that the engine stayed on more often, but I never saw the A/C automaticallly shut itself off. That would be a strange thing for it to do, since it would be contradicting the user's wishes.
According to GM, I guess if I never go on longer trips, my Volt will be getting infinity miles per gallon.
You haven't taken into account GM's secret plan: recall all of the Volts after a year or two, crush them into cubes, and go back to selling 11MPG SUVs. That will guarantee that no Volt uses any gasoline at all after 2012, and therefore the Volts will all have infinite miles per gallon (as they are transported to the scrap yard).
Not that I'm cynical or anything.
One case a colleague of mine involved the usual defense of "a trojan did it"
I'm rather surprised trojans don't do it more often. It seems like a pretty viable extortion scheme:
But a dog does not have near-human intelligence. It doesn't even have remotely human intelligence -- it has simply learned behaviors that we can understand and manipulate to a far greater degree than other animals.
The thing is, you could say the same thing about a lot of people as well -- but that doesn't mean they aren't human.
Human intelligence varies greatly from one individual to the next, and so does canine intelligence, and the two ranges overlap somewhat. I won't try to speculate as to what the moral implications of that fact are, but they are probably significant.
Programming in the large isn't about being clever. It's about being unclever, and hence producing maintainable code. That hasn't yet sunk in for our dear Bjarne.
Let's imagine that poor deluded Bjarne follows your advice, sees the light, and realizes that C++ is a complicated mess. What would you have him do at that point? Lobby the C++ committee to strip out all the "difficult" features for the next version of C++, thereby creating a language called "C++" that nevertheless is incompatible with 80% of the C++ code that exists in the world, and guaranteeing that either nobody ever uses the new version, or that the C++ world gets forked into two opposing camps?
Perhaps there is something you haven't realized yet as well -- that "learnability" is far from the only issue to consider when trying to improve a widely-used language. I think Bjarne is well aware of the many trade-offs that have to be made, and he has valid reasons for his decisions. But don't let that interfere with your armchair psychoanalysis.
I would feel better if they were making an AFFORDABLE economical vehicle that would benefit the majority of Americans (and the environment).
Me too, but experience has shown that you can't approach the problem that way. A number of companies have tried make "economical" electric cars, and they end up looking (and driving) like golf carts, while still costing more than, say, a Honda Civic. So when the companies go to sell these cars, the American public just laughs at them, and the companies quickly go out of business. The companies never have a chance to produce a more attractive product, because they never have a chance to establish the manufacturing base necessary to make electric vehicles efficiently, and therefore they can't compete with gas-powered cars.
Tesla is trying to opposite approach: instead of trying to compete with Ford/Honda/Toyota/GM/etc on the low end (an economic suicide mission), they are starting from the high end and working their way down. It turns out that you can make a fairly competitive electric sports-car, because at the high end, pricing is less of an obstacle to consumer acceptance, and therefore you can sell cars even if you have to give them a pretty large markup to offset your startup costs.
Tesla's next step after the Roadster will be to sell the Model S, which will compete with the Mercedes and the BMWs of the world and sell in greater numbers than the niche Roadster product. Assuming the Model S is successful, their next product will be an even more inexpensive model to compete with the Nissans and Hondas of the world. At each step of the way, they leverage the capital and knowledge gained in the previous product to make something that is more mainstream, more cheaply than they previously could have done. In this way, they (hopefully) have a viable path towards making electric cars a popular mass-market product, which is something that you can't say for the electric-car companies that tried things your way and failed.
Who knows whether they will succeed or not, but the plan certainly has its merits.
Making 10,000 unaffordable "green" cars over 10 years has very little environmental impact and not worth my tax dollars in my opinion
That isn't the goal, so your opinion is unfounded.
You're objecting to yourself, and not even aware of it. You may even consider yourself particularly clever because cynicism and negativism pass for intelligence in these degenerate days.
Geez dude, all he said was that there were "issues to consider". Are you proposing that there aren't any issues worth considering? You sound a bit cynical yourself...
It's not just theory.... here is an article about just such a robotic system, including a video demonstrating it operating.
but the idea of Everyman being able to charge his electric car in his garage in an hour isn't going to happen anytime soon
I don't think anyone was suggesting that it would happen. Realistically, there would be two choices: Recharge slowly in your garage, overnight (good for local driving), or recharge quickly at a specially equipped recharging station (good for refueling during long trips). The former is more easily achieved than the latter, since garage electrical outlets already exist and super-electric-charging stations don't, but it's possible to build them if we want to.
What's amusing to me is that if you want to education or health care funded in the US, you have to lobby Congress like hell to fund it.
Conversely, if you are the head of the Department of Defense and don't need or want a pointless weapons program, you have to lobby Congress like hell not not fund it.
You've again failed to identify how the land is "destroyed". It will still be largely as livable for the plants and animals of the region as it was previously. But if you're just here to call names, by all means go ahead. I know what a thrill it can be to call everyone who disagrees with you a hypocrite.
Those wind farms really scar the countryside [...] These things destroy hundreds of square miles
What damage, precisely, is done to the countryside? Other than the tweaking of some peoples' overly-developed sense of aesthetics, and a few access roads and power lines, I don't see much damage being done. It's certainly a lot easier on the enviroment than mining, oil drilling, or hydro would be, and it has the added benefit of guaranteeing that no additional development will occur on the land, indefinitely -- i.e. once you've built your wind farm there, the chances of a city/freeway/landfill/etc being built on the same land are slim to none. For any plants/animals that can tolerate the presence of windmills (i.e. most of them), that's not a bad deal.
The issue which motivates us to move to clean energy sources is a buildup of excess thermal energy in the atmosphere. We're trying to reduce the energy in the atmosphere, just to get things back to normal.
I think you have a slight misconception of the problem. It's not the release of heat into the atmosphere that's the problem, it's the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That may sound like almost the same thing, but it's not -- it's the gases that act as a huge blanket, trapping heat in. Without those gases, the extra heat would quickly bleed out into space, as it did before the Industrial Revolution. With those gases present in sufficient quantities, we're still in trouble even if we don't generate any extra heat on the surface -- the heat from the sun will continue to be trapped and heat the earth more than we'd like it to.
To sum up: The release of man-made heat on Earth's surface is not a significant part of the problem. The release of massive quantities CO2 that was previously sequestered underground is the problem.
No energy is truly "free," after all.
Very true. So what do you recommend? Going back to manual subsistence farming?
If not, then it's clear we're going to have get our energy from somewhere. Given that and your statement above, it's inevitable that there will be a cost of some sort. The costs we are paying for our current system include: global warming, political instability, and inevitable energy scarcity as fossil fuel resources become depleted. The possibility that the costs of a renewable energy infrastructure would be worse is non-zero, but laughably small... especially when you consider that the costs of a non-renewable system eventually approach infinity as the resources it depends on dwindle to exhaustion.
Am I the only one who gets nervous with this concept?! If the beams are even slightly out you could be frying people rather than generating electricity.
No, you're not the only one; that's the first thing everyone thinks. Personally I blame SimCity. Seriously, don't you think the designers of such a system would have considered that possibility and made damn sure to design it so that "frying people" can't possibly happen? Take 30 seconds to do some research on the subject, you'll see that the proposed systems would be unable to fry anyone.
And you just know the control systems will be conficker infected XP machines with direct access to the Internet :(
You're assuming the system safeguards would be implemented in software -- that would be an insanely poor design. In real life, the hardware would be designed such that "frying people" is literally physically impossible, no matter how badly the control software malfunctions.
There will _always_ be more people.
There will _always_ be greater demand for resources
Given a finite amount of resources on earth, the above is clearly false. As resources become more scarce, prices will rise, which will reduce demand. And in the long run, there won't be any more people living on Earth than Earth can support, by definition.
The only question is how to deal with the problem. Conservationists recommend.... conserving resources, so that they will last longer. It's not a difficult position to understand.
Giant carrot people drinking from bottles while playing musical instruments
Curse you, you've discovered the secret! Sorry goffster, but we're going to have to kill you now. We hate to do it, but we can't risk you telling anyone else.
The man's entire presidency was an exercise in law breaking and ass-covering.
Bush didn't see himself as breaking any laws. The way he saw it, as "War President" he wasn't bound by any laws. The ass-covering part was merely an attempt to avoid the hassle of having to explain that to a bunch of naive liberal lawyers who foolishly believed what they were told in civics class.
If it really was that good, then why would they talk about it after they prove the concept first...
You're absolutely right. From now on, all scientific research should be kept completely confidential until they have developed a product that is ready to ship. After all, there's no value to scientific knowledge; the only things worth talking about are consumer products.
Stupid git.
isnt benzene a carcinogen?
Not to worry -- we will put a big red sticker on the side of the drive that says "DO NOT EAT".
Perhaps we can find a way to harness the power of Americans whining about their as-yet-imaginary future energy bills? That would give us a wealth of power for decades.
Seriously guys, nad up. You all sound like Neville Chamberlain whining about how difficult and expensive fighting the Germans is going to be, and how they'll probably go away by themselves if we just continue to ignore them for another couple of years.
You don't even need to do that. Just launch a couple of heavy bricks up into space and de-orbit them on command.
The problem with that approach is that you only get so many "shots" before you have to send up another rocket full of bricks to re-load -- a potentially expensive prospect. The solar-powered laser system, on the other hand, would have the advantage of being usable 24/7/365 forever, without ever having to "reload" it.
The microwave beams here aren't concentrated enough to be useful as any sort of weapon, either purposely or accidental.
True... but out of curiosity, what if someone (say, the military of a well-funded country) wanted to make a solar-powered satellite that could emit a concentrated laser beam instead of a diffuse microwave beam? Is such a thing feasible with existing technology? I can imagine that the ability to light things on fire from space, anywhere on earth, at any time, on a few minute's notice, might be of interest to people with an appropriately Machiavellian mindset...
if everything works perfectly this will be awesome, but nothing ever works perfectly and just the thought of the things that can go wrong scares the hell out of me.
That's just irrational fear of the unfamiliar. The thing everybody immediately imagines is the beam going off-target and frying something. However, that scenario isn't possible, since (a) the beam is diffuse enough that you wouldn't notice it even if it did hit you, and (b) the system can be designed to automatically shut off the beam if the satellite ever goes off-target. (i.e. put a beacon at the center of the target, put a very narrow-field beacon detector on the satellite, if the detector doesn't see the beacon for any reason, it cuts off the microwave beam)
Compared to the risks that we already accept with existing power technologies (e.g. coal slurry floods, war in the middle east, nuclear terrorism, global warming), this system is much safer to operate. Of course its economic viability is a separate issue.