Slashdot Mirror


User: ShakaUVM

ShakaUVM's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
5,427
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 5,427

  1. Re:If you build it, they will come on Tesla To Blanket US With Superchargers In Two Years · · Score: 1

    That's how the calculations are done. If they're at a disadvantage, they're at a disadvantage.

  2. Re:If you build it, they will come on Tesla To Blanket US With Superchargers In Two Years · · Score: 1

    That is why you have to look at levellized costs of energy, amortized over either 10 or 20 years.

    It's very expensive to get free energy.

    Overall, it works out to about 25c/kWh for my system, which is higher than Tier 1 power, but lower than Tier 3-5 power.

  3. Re:If you build it, they will come on Tesla To Blanket US With Superchargers In Two Years · · Score: 1

    We're talking about the Tesla Superchargers. You can't control when people use them, really.

    People will tend to fill up during daylight hours.

  4. Re:If you build it, they will come on Tesla To Blanket US With Superchargers In Two Years · · Score: 1

    >He can make a killing selling electricity from his solar-powered chargers at 0.49%/KWhr to the grid

    If you meant to say 49c/kWh, that's not much of a discount.

    My solar system produces at a LEC of 24c/kWh or so.

  5. Re:If you build it, they will come on Tesla To Blanket US With Superchargers In Two Years · · Score: 1

    >Switching to time of use billing significantly reduces the rate for charging an EV.

    For personal use, sure, and if you're willing to wait till night to recharge. Even then, I'd never say it gets *cheap* here in California. Tier 4 residential TOU is still 30c/kWh, which still isn't competitive with a gas hybrid.

    >As for Tesla's rate for their Superchargers, they are planning to offset the electricity use with solar (supplied by Elon Musk's company Solar City).

    Solar costs money, too. As I said, it'll be about half of peak PG&E rates. Still not cheap by any stretch of the imagination.

  6. Re:If you build it, they will come on Tesla To Blanket US With Superchargers In Two Years · · Score: 2

    >Commercial and residential rates are billed wildly different. Second, energy rates vary wildly. Depending on the region, like Texas or Tennessee, energy rates are closer to $0.06/kwh if you shop around. Obviously the more you buy, the more you save.

    Peak power costs (Tier 5) for residential is also about 55c/kWh (http://www.pge.com/tariffs/ResTOUCurrent.xls). That's why I put solar on my house. The LEC of solar is about half peak power rates - so you install just enough solar capacity to drop you back down into the reasonable power rate tiers (which start at 8c here for Tier 1 Winter power).

    Here in California, the more you buy, the more the cost of power goes up. The lower tiers are supposedly subsidized by the higher tiers, but even the lower tiers are much more expensive than power elsewhere. Also, one should note the price of natural gas has plummeted, but mysteriously enough, the price of our power is about the same as it was four years ago.

  7. Re:If you build it, they will come on Tesla To Blanket US With Superchargers In Two Years · · Score: 1

    >Where are you getting gas that cheap? Or your car has a really small gas tank. I pay between $60-70 to fill up.

    Google says the average gas tank is 12 gallons, so at $3.75 a gallon here in Fresno, that works out to $45.

    That gasoline gets you about double the the range of a Tesla (265 miles) for about the same price, assuming you have an efficient gas powered car or hybrid.

    So there's really no cost advantage of electricity over gas at peak power rates. Obviously, as I said, if you build out solar at roughly have the rate of peak power costs, you'll break even.

  8. Re:If you build it, they will come on Tesla To Blanket US With Superchargers In Two Years · · Score: 1

    >Electricity really isn't that expensive.

    Maybe where you live. I live in California, where peak energy rates hit .49 $/kWh, filliing up a 60 kWh or 85 kWh battery will cost up to $30 or $42.50, respectively. About the same as a tank of gas.

    This will become very, very expensive. They can halve the costs installing large scale solar, but you're still going to get into a very expensive obligation that will probably result in the company going bankrupt over the long run.

  9. Re:They need something to replace WOW on Blizzard's Unannounced 'Titan' MMO Rebooted, Development Team Reduced · · Score: 2

    Yep, a lot of people don't give SWTOR enough credit. The level 40s drag for a bit, but it's a really fun single player game that just happens to be an MMO.

    I don't think I bought more than one or two items on the auction house on my way up to 50, as opposed to Diablo 3, where spending even a small amount made your character six billion times more powerful and had a much worse storyline.

  10. Re:If I learned anything from Asheron's Call 2 on Blizzard's Unannounced 'Titan' MMO Rebooted, Development Team Reduced · · Score: 1

    >Or the recent Blizzard offering, Diablo 3.

    Which blows out of the water their claim the delays have anything about waiting for games that set a high bar for quality.

  11. Re:Wake up on Ask Slashdot: Moving From Contract Developers To Hiring One In-House? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    >Waking up would be a good solution to your problem. You don't pay for bugs? Oh shut the fuck up, if your specs were so masterfully created there would be no bugs.

    It's very likely that his developers are, in fact, not perfect, but don't have an incentive to bug fix after they got paid.

    Solution: Don't give them the final payment until the customer signs off on it.

  12. Re:Sheesh on FBI Considers CALEA II: Mandatory Wiretapping On Every Device · · Score: 1

    >We, europeans see you like living in a police state

    Do you live in the UK? I'd love for you to be from the UK, as that would be really rich. I'm surprised the UK hasn't mandated cameras strapped to the head of every citizen yet.

    >Life in America is much worse nowadays than most of the rest of the world.

    Bullfuckingshit. I've travelled the world. There's only a few places I'd love to live more than America, and those places aren't very practical places to live.

  13. Re:Brain Dead Action Trumps Philosophy & Ethic on Review: Star Trek: Into Darkness · · Score: 1

    I haven't seen Into Darkness but a lot of this review covered what was painfully realized in the first movie: no longer is Trek about philosophy, ethics, tolerance, gray areas and real world problems. It's mostly absolute good versus absolute evil. I think the driving force behind the bad guy in the first movie was largely a misunderstanding ... which is incredibly boring. His motivation was confusingly laughable.

    Unsurprisingly I'm pretty sure I heard JJ Abrams tell Jon Stewart that "he never liked Star Trek" on The Daily Show. Well, now he's had a chance to kill it by turning it 100% into a modern day blockbuster action flick and shirking any attempt to tackle an interesting philosophical or ethical dilemma as the main plot. As the modern reemergence of comic book and super hero movies have shown, those films are a dime a dozen that anyone can do. Tackling something deeper while still holding our attention is the hard part. The Watchmen was a good candidate for it but fell short. I'm sure JJ Abrams would rather cover up the complicated parts that question good versus evil with another lens flare.

    Yep. I made the mistake of watching the 2009 Star Trek. It was a disaster of a movie. A lot of people have told me they think it's a good movie, just not a good Trek movie, but I don't think it's even a very good movie on its own rights. Horrible plot. Horrible characterization. Horrible product placement.

  14. Re:Citations? They need to be sued heavily on Florida DOT Cuts Yellow Light Delay Ignoring Federal Guidelines, Citations Soar · · Score: 1

    >I bet you that they have immunity of some sort. That is the problem

    Sure, so maybe you won't get the legislators thrown in jail (unless you can prove bribery by the red light cam companies), but a reasonably unbribed judge should throw out the lessened yellow light delays and overturn the tickets.

    That's exactly what happened here in San Diego when the exact same thing happened. We've since removed red light cams entirely.

  15. Re:Confused on Integer Overflow Bug Leads To Diablo III Gold Duping · · Score: 3, Funny

    Baldur's Gate stored various things as unsigned shorts, IIRC.

    There was a monster called the nishruu that would drain charges off your magic items. So after one combat, I found I now had a charged magic item with 32,000-ish charges on it.

    Since the gold value of magic items was proportional to the number of charges remaining, I sold it and never needed to worry about money again in the game.

  16. Of course it has an effect.

    But shutting down a lane of the I-5 or the I-405 is much worse.

  17. >Or maybe it's because there are 7 million more people in LA County than in Orange County?

    Yes, because there is such a massive leap in population density when you hit the LA County border. That must explain it!

    Orange County is part of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, so it serves as a good natural experiment demonstrating the effects the different policies have had since the 1970s.

    Orange County has bad traffic. Los Angeles has indescribably shitty traffic.

    >Auto travel does not scale efficiently and over the long term LA is going to have to significantly improve its mass transit (ie subway, light rail, street cars NOT buses) to have any chance of improving congestion.

    Yeah, see that's the nice thing about empirical evidence. It shows you're completely full of it. Orange County was able to scale its freeways and has maintained a consistently busy but usable road network. LA is still using the same roads from 40 years ago, a fact that is lost on idiots like you that think it is "proof" that roads do not scale.

    Of course, you might be right insofar as they've gone so far down the rabbit hole, they have no chance to dig themselves out now. It'd probably be a billion dollars (that they don't have) just to fix the I-5/I-10 interchange.

  18. 405 on Elon Musk Hates 405 Freeway Traffic, Pays Money To Speed Construction · · Score: 1, Interesting

    "The 405 Freeway runs from the northern end of the San Fernando Valley all the way down to El Torro and runs by LAX."

    And is a complete and total piece of shit. Unlike Orange County, which has been upgrading its road network for the last 40 years, LA in the 1970s diverted money away from roads and into mass transit systems (subway, light rail, bus). The net result is the completely clogged arteries of the city, which its vaunted bus network needs dedicated lanes to even barely function in.

    Everyone knows when they reach the boundary between OC and LA. Going one way, it opens up from 25MPH to 85MPH. Coming the other way, it slams down from 85MPH to 25MPH.

    Also, it's spelled El Toro.

  19. Re:Bad Ruling on Should California Have Banned Checking Smartphone Maps While Driving? · · Score: 1

    >No. The judge isn't allowed to consider those other pieces of legislation and non-legislation that you provided. The judge is only allowed to look at the relevant law

    Uh, no. Judges have to look at all relevant laws, and adjudicate them if they conflict, and work to make sure no law is made to be pointless by another.

    Read Bush v. Gore some time.

  20. Re:Hypocrisy on Massive Data Leak Reveals How the Ultra Rich Hide Their Wealth · · Score: 1

    At a certain point, the police load will grow great enough that the city needs to build another police station.

    Any way you want to cut it, the proportionate load that Microsoft places on the system is far less than the amount of taxes they pay.

  21. Re:Hypocrisy on Massive Data Leak Reveals How the Ultra Rich Hide Their Wealth · · Score: 1

    In a town with 100 people, the marginal cost of adding 1 more person to police protective services is 1% of the current budget. This is identical to you saying all 101 people should pay equal amounts.

    If that one new person pays 100x the taxes of the other citizens, he's not a "leech". He's a net contributor to government, not a net drain.

  22. Re:Hypocrisy on Massive Data Leak Reveals How the Ultra Rich Hide Their Wealth · · Score: 1

    >As I pointed out: If you're driving somewhere and I get a ride with you, the fair price for me to pay is at least to split the gas costs. If I only pay the "Marginal" cost of adding me to the trip, I'm not paying my fair share. Likewise, if every person only paid the marginal cost of their existence, the price that it would cost to add them presuming everyone else was still there, it does NOT ADD UP TO THE FULL PRICE.

    Great, thanks for agreeing with me.

    Microsoft employs 57,000 people in America, or a hundreth of one percent.

    Therefore they are liable for no more than $642M a year in order to pay "their fair share".

    Thanks for playing.

  23. Re:Archer? on Microsoft Apologizes For Cavalier 'Always-Online' DRM Tweets · · Score: 5, Funny

    >Recently an Australian telephone exchange burned down in Warrnambool

    Move.

    -Xbox Creative Director

  24. Re:Hypocrisy on Massive Data Leak Reveals How the Ultra Rich Hide Their Wealth · · Score: 1

    >1) How much does Microsoft BENEFIT from the government? Enforcement on Microsoft software requires a complete legal system, educated judges and lawyers, an educated public to sit on juries. It requires roads for these people to move around, social services to keep these people alive. It's not a simple calculation, like you try to make it sound. Microsoft couldn't exist in a vacuum.

    What is Microsoft's MARGINAL cost to government? If Microsoft vanished overnight, we'd still have judges, a public education system, and so forth.

    >The word marginal is a weasel word here - it implies that society would pay everything that was necessary without Microsoft, and that MS should just add the difference.

    The word marginal is key. It's all these nonsense Elizabeth Warren arguments that pretend that if Microsoft doesn't pay for bloody everything, they're not paying enough.

    >they rely on the protection of the military, who as I pointed out benefit THEM far more than anyone else.

    The military protects everyone in America equally. Until we invade China over pirated copies of MS Office, I think your argument isn't going to fly.

    >PS: Nice goalpost move from BillyG -> Microsoft

    The arguments apply equally well. Bill Gates pays far more into government than he receives back. Does his kid even go to public school? How many poor kids can go to school because of Gates' property taxes?

    Actually, we can calculate that. His house is worth $150M. Property tax in WA is 1%. He pays therefore $1.5M per year in property tax. It costs roughly $10k/student to go to public school. Therefore Gates is supporting 150 homeless kids (i.e. who are paying no property tax at all) on his nickel. While his kid doesn't benefit from public schooling at all, AFAIK.

    Tell me again how he's a leech.

  25. Re:More succinctly on Massive Data Leak Reveals How the Ultra Rich Hide Their Wealth · · Score: 1

    Our school system is socialist, and eats up 40% of the resources here in California. The main reason we do worse than other areas is the kids, though.

    But my point was on national debt, and countries fleeing France due to its extortionate tax rate.