There is no new technology required to build electric cars.
But there is a lot of engineering work that needs to be done in order to build them at prices that can compete with gas-powered cars.
If you want electric cars to be delivered next year you just have to do one thing -- increase the price of fuel dramatically.
Yes, a hefty gas tax would help a lot. Unfortunately, it's politically a non-starter in the US, and it's not going to happen, so there's little use discussing it.
Until that happens none of this matters and no efforts short of that to move to electric cars will work.
Don't you think that when the inevitable gas shortage arrives and prices spike up again, it would be nice to have decent mass-produced electric cars already available for sale? Or should we wait until the crisis occurs, and only then say "okay! Start designing electric cars! We should have them ready to buy in, oh, five years!"
In my opinion, it's nice to see the US government exercising a little foresight, for once, and not just overreacting after it's already too late to do anything.
How about an electric car people can actually buy? Innovation not required!
It's not sufficient to build a car that people can buy, it also has to be a car they want to buy, or it won't sell.
Various companies have tried the "rip out the engine of a standard car and replace it with an electric motor" route before, and it doesn't work. You end up selling what looks like a $15,000 car for $35,000, and the car has a top speed of 70 miles an hour, a range of 40 miles, and takes 6 hours to "refill". The public has already said thanks, but no thanks, to that type of product.
If you actually want to sell electric cars, you have to make them good enough that people will want to buy them, and that means designing them from the ground up as electric cars, not retrofitting an electric motor into an inappropriate framework.
Batteries will last quite a while if you treat them right.
Is there any reason to even include batteries as part of your system, if you are installing solar on a house that is tied to a reliable municipal grid?
But coal has been binding carbon in the ground for hundreds of millions of years. That would seem to demonstrate that sequestration can be made to work.
Yeah, okay... but we a solution that we can implement within the century. Solutions that take hundreds of millions of years don't count.
That said, if you know of some process that converts carbon dioxide gas back into a solid that can be buried, and does so without requiring lots of energy, please apply for a patent on it, it will probably make you rich!:^)
is it possible for the large amount of energy pulled from the winds to change weather patterns even slightly?
Sure, it probably would.
Now you have to ask yourself this: Is it possible that the vast amounts of CO2 currently being pushed into the atmosphere in lieu of wind power will change weather patterns more? To that the answer is: definitely.
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days
Ah, but there is wind all the time, somewhere. In theory at least, with a capable enough grid you'd be able to move energy from wherever the wind currently is to where the energy is needed.
I agree that an efficient way to store energy for future use would be greatly beneficial, though.
The economy would go into the toilet and that would raise the real cost of power to even higher, and the demand would go down even more. By the end of the year we'd be all living in dirt huts. But, ya know, reality.. never let it get in the way of an indignant cause.
If you're concerned with reality, why not examine it rather than putting up a straw man?
A real solution would build out wind and solar resources over a number of decades, and wind down coal usage as the load gets shifted over.
Nobody is proposing anything remotely like forcibly converting the entire world to wind/solar within one year.
Gee just setup sshd to run on the wow port. What port number or numbers are those?
I don't know if that would be sufficient; they are likely filtering based on the structure of the data within the packets, and not just on port numbers.
That said, I like the idea of a "WoW tunnel", where the data from the Iranian protester's computer gets encrypted/obfuscated, then sent to his WoW client as a line of text for his WoW to speak, at which point the text gets heard by a non-Iranian WoW character standing next to him, passed to a non-Iranian WoW client, from there to a matching proxy, which decrypts the text and forwards it out to the Internet... and of course, the same thing in the opposite direction.
Slow, but hard to stop without shutting down WoW...
If I have a disease that costs $800K to fix the solution is simple, I say my time has come.
That's cool, I support a person's right to die on their own terms. But what about when your 3-year-old daughter comes down with leukemia (or whatnot), and it will cost somebody $800,000 to keep her from dying of it? Are you going to tell her "tough shit, your time has come, death is a natural and necessary part of living"?
Thank you SO MUCH for not saying "incentivized" or "incentivised." Sorry for the off-topic, grammer/spelling oriented comment. But I just had to say it because I hate the word.
No doubt a fleet of electricity generating kites are going to cost a pretty penny.
Why is there "no doubt" about this? Is there some reason why kites have to be very expensive?
Second, why would you invest in a new technology when there are other (probably more-efficient) green technologies.
For the same reason you invested in the other green technologies even when there were older technologies already available then -- because it was a promising idea.
Now isn't the time to start innovating from scratch with the global recession.
Now is exactly the time. A few technological "game changers" could be just what it takes to boost us out of recession.
Lastly, where are going to put them, in the plains of the Midwest?
Sure, why not? Or any other place that has wind at 30,000 feet and isn't in anybody's flight path.
What happens when the kites start interfering with birds and such?
Great defense against incoming jetliners as the kites get sucked into engines, either from terrorists or major campaign donors out for a spin in Air Force One.
America circa 1960: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." America circa 2009: "OMG terrorists!"
Honestly, will we ever get our national cojones back?
(not that I think kite-power is necessarily a realistic idea, I'm just tired of the knee-jerk genuflection towards our new Al Quaeda overlords)
Put it this way; that feeling of power one gets when bullying (or torturing) a person is not just an imaginary rush of adrenaline or somesuch.
Alien bullies? Perhaps, but that has little to do with nutrition, which is what I thought you were talking about when you said 'they consider us food'.
Actually, it's by far the most dangerous. It is completely unshielded, and its ionizing radiation is responsible for thousands of cancer deaths each year.
Of course, there is the small detail of it being equally dangerous whether you harvest the power, or not. So we might as well....
They don't consider us equals. Far from it; they consider us food.
Actually it's probably worse (or better, depending on your perspective) than that. Aliens wouldn't consider us food for the simple reason that we almost certainly wouldn't agree with them. Life that has evolved in different biospheres very likely evolved using very different chemicals, and so an alien would obtain no more nutrition by eating a human than he would by eating the human's car.
More likely, any aliens would be so different from us that they wouldn't even consider us to be life. To them, the Earth would look like a lifeless planet, although perhaps they'd notice the presence of some some sort of interesting chemical processes marring the surface.
You're assuming that exploiting natural resources and fighting with each other is only a human issue.
My feeling is that any species capable of crossing interstellar space probably wouldn't find Earth a very interesting place to find resources. More likely they'd tap into Jupiter or one of the other 'large' planets, or perhaps directly into the sun itself. If they were interested in Earth at all, it would likely be for scientific reasons, not commercial ones.
What's needed is a cell phone with GPS (eg iPhone) and a button that is present during phone conversations, that when pressed causes the phone to send its current GPS coordinates to the remote party as an SMS message.
Then you could just call your daughter and ask her to press the button, and copy the result into google maps (or whatever)
If we had unlimited funds then we could just _buy_ all the oil we needed
Not so. There's a finite supply of oil in the world, and an infinite amount of demand (given enough time, of course). At some point you will not be able to buy enough oil, no matter how much money you are willing to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
lots of pissed birds, bats, pollen and insects too.
Hell hath no fury like a pollen scorned.
There is no new technology required to build electric cars.
But there is a lot of engineering work that needs to be done in order to build them at prices that can compete with gas-powered cars.
If you want electric cars to be delivered next year you just have to do one thing -- increase the price of fuel dramatically.
Yes, a hefty gas tax would help a lot. Unfortunately, it's politically a non-starter in the US, and it's not going to happen, so there's little use discussing it.
Until that happens none of this matters and no efforts short of that to move to electric cars will work.
Don't you think that when the inevitable gas shortage arrives and prices spike up again, it would be nice to have decent mass-produced electric cars already available for sale? Or should we wait until the crisis occurs, and only then say "okay! Start designing electric cars! We should have them ready to buy in, oh, five years!"
In my opinion, it's nice to see the US government exercising a little foresight, for once, and not just overreacting after it's already too late to do anything.
How about an electric car people can actually buy? Innovation not required!
It's not sufficient to build a car that people can buy, it also has to be a car they want to buy, or it won't sell.
Various companies have tried the "rip out the engine of a standard car and replace it with an electric motor" route before, and it doesn't work. You end up selling what looks like a $15,000 car for $35,000, and the car has a top speed of 70 miles an hour, a range of 40 miles, and takes 6 hours to "refill". The public has already said thanks, but no thanks, to that type of product.
If you actually want to sell electric cars, you have to make them good enough that people will want to buy them, and that means designing them from the ground up as electric cars, not retrofitting an electric motor into an inappropriate framework.
Batteries will last quite a while if you treat them right.
Is there any reason to even include batteries as part of your system, if you are installing solar on a house that is tied to a reliable municipal grid?
But coal has been binding carbon in the ground for hundreds of millions of years. That would seem to demonstrate that sequestration can be made to work.
Yeah, okay... but we a solution that we can implement within the century. Solutions that take hundreds of millions of years don't count.
That said, if you know of some process that converts carbon dioxide gas back into a solid that can be buried, and does so without requiring lots of energy, please apply for a patent on it, it will probably make you rich! :^)
Scientists confirmed today that Global Slowing is real.
Good, I could use a few more hours in the day. (Not to mention a few hours extra sleep every night!)
is it possible for the large amount of energy pulled from the winds to change weather patterns even slightly?
Sure, it probably would.
Now you have to ask yourself this: Is it possible that the vast amounts of CO2 currently being pushed into the atmosphere in lieu of wind power will change weather patterns more? To that the answer is: definitely.
Can someone please tell me what coal is if it is not carbon sequestration?
Carbon desequestration. You see, people are taking the coal out of the ground, not putting coal into the ground.
It just couldn't simply because there isn't wind all the time and we don't have any realistic way to store energy for calm days
Ah, but there is wind all the time, somewhere. In theory at least, with a capable enough grid you'd be able to move energy from wherever the wind currently is to where the energy is needed.
I agree that an efficient way to store energy for future use would be greatly beneficial, though.
The economy would go into the toilet and that would raise the real cost of power to even higher, and the demand would go down even more. By the end of the year we'd be all living in dirt huts. But, ya know, reality.. never let it get in the way of an indignant cause.
If you're concerned with reality, why not examine it rather than putting up a straw man?
A real solution would build out wind and solar resources over a number of decades, and wind down coal usage as the load gets shifted over.
Nobody is proposing anything remotely like forcibly converting the entire world to wind/solar within one year.
Wait, how do you remove the iPhone's battery again ?
Tin snips do a pretty good job...
Gee just setup sshd to run on the wow port. What port number or numbers are those?
I don't know if that would be sufficient; they are likely filtering based on the structure of the data within the packets, and not just on port numbers.
That said, I like the idea of a "WoW tunnel", where the data from the Iranian protester's computer gets encrypted/obfuscated, then sent to his WoW client as a line of text for his WoW to speak, at which point the text gets heard by a non-Iranian WoW character standing next to him, passed to a non-Iranian WoW client, from there to a matching proxy, which decrypts the text and forwards it out to the Internet... and of course, the same thing in the opposite direction.
Slow, but hard to stop without shutting down WoW...
If I have a disease that costs $800K to fix the solution is simple, I say my time has come.
That's cool, I support a person's right to die on their own terms. But what about when your 3-year-old daughter comes down with leukemia (or whatnot), and it will cost somebody $800,000 to keep her from dying of it? Are you going to tell her "tough shit, your time has come, death is a natural and necessary part of living"?
Thank you SO MUCH for not saying "incentivized" or "incentivised." Sorry for the off-topic, grammer/spelling oriented comment. But I just had to say it because I hate the word.
Yes, that word leaves me positively incensed.
No doubt a fleet of electricity generating kites are going to cost a pretty penny.
Why is there "no doubt" about this? Is there some reason why kites have to be very expensive?
Second, why would you invest in a new technology when there are other (probably more-efficient) green technologies.
For the same reason you invested in the other green technologies even when there were older technologies already available then -- because it was a promising idea.
Now isn't the time to start innovating from scratch with the global recession.
Now is exactly the time. A few technological "game changers" could be just what it takes to boost us out of recession.
Lastly, where are going to put them, in the plains of the Midwest?
Sure, why not? Or any other place that has wind at 30,000 feet and isn't in anybody's flight path.
What happens when the kites start interfering with birds and such?
Not many birds fly at 30,000 feet, Einstein.
Great defense against incoming jetliners as the kites get sucked into engines, either from terrorists or major campaign donors out for a spin in Air Force One.
America circa 1960: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
America circa 2009: "OMG terrorists!"
Honestly, will we ever get our national cojones back?
(not that I think kite-power is necessarily a realistic idea, I'm just tired of the knee-jerk genuflection towards our new Al Quaeda overlords)
I feel horrible after reading that. The way you're so enthusiastic - it's like the blurb for a Lonely Planet guide!
You're right, expressing enthusiasm about video games is completely inappropriate in a venue like Slashdot.
Put it this way; that feeling of power one gets when bullying (or torturing) a person is not just an imaginary rush of adrenaline or somesuch.
Alien bullies? Perhaps, but that has little to do with nutrition, which is what I thought you were talking about when you said 'they consider us food'.
Actually, it's by far the most dangerous. It is completely unshielded, and its ionizing radiation is responsible for thousands of cancer deaths each year.
Of course, there is the small detail of it being equally dangerous whether you harvest the power, or not. So we might as well....
The quality of their business plan is completely irrelevant to my reaction to my inability to purchase their product.
Also, your reaction to your inability to purchase their product is completely irrelevant to the quality of their business plan.
They don't consider us equals. Far from it; they consider us food.
Actually it's probably worse (or better, depending on your perspective) than that. Aliens wouldn't consider us food for the simple reason that we almost certainly wouldn't agree with them. Life that has evolved in different biospheres very likely evolved using very different chemicals, and so an alien would obtain no more nutrition by eating a human than he would by eating the human's car.
More likely, any aliens would be so different from us that they wouldn't even consider us to be life. To them, the Earth would look like a lifeless planet, although perhaps they'd notice the presence of some some sort of interesting chemical processes marring the surface.
You're assuming that exploiting natural resources and fighting with each other is only a human issue.
My feeling is that any species capable of crossing interstellar space probably wouldn't find Earth a very interesting place to find resources. More likely they'd tap into Jupiter or one of the other 'large' planets, or perhaps directly into the sun itself. If they were interested in Earth at all, it would likely be for scientific reasons, not commercial ones.
What's needed is a cell phone with GPS (eg iPhone) and a button that is present during phone conversations, that when pressed causes the phone to send its current GPS coordinates to the remote party as an SMS message.
Then you could just call your daughter and ask her to press the button, and copy the result into google maps (or whatever)
(listen carefully... you might hear a whooshing sound if you think i'm serious)
Dammit -- of course I didn't read this bit until after I replied.
Please ignore me, I'm an idiot....
If we had unlimited funds then we could just _buy_ all the oil we needed
Not so. There's a finite supply of oil in the world, and an infinite amount of demand (given enough time, of course). At some point you will not be able to buy enough oil, no matter how much money you are willing to pay.