You dont pay for other people who are unhealthy. In fact, its all the people who abuse the health insurance by being to healthy that keep the rates high. People who go to the doctor every time they get a little snifflle and get prescription drugs for everything under the son even though they dont really need them. I know people who go to the doctors 50+ times a year and are completely healthy. They are not healthy just because they go to the doctor so much, but that is a lot of wasted money for going to the doctors for no reason.
What country are you in? The days of unlimited free office visits have long passed for most people in the USA - the $35 copay I have to pay every time I see a doctor goes a long way toward limiting my office visits. Do you have any evidence that wellness visits are driving up healthcare costs? I've seen lots of talk about defensive medicine causing unnecessary healthcare costs and end-of-life care driving up healthcare costs (something like 25% of healthcare expenditures are spent on patients in the last year of their life), but I haven't seen any statistics pointing to wellness visits as being responsible for high healthcare costs. It seems that the inconvenience alone of seeing a doctor would keep unnecessary visits to a minimum.
There is nothing to indicate you would be charged less is everyone suddenly adopted a healthy lifestyle - whatever that means. I expect heath care costs and taxation to continue along the path of "all the traffic will bear". With some good spin-doctoring like you spouted to keep people docile.
State insurance regulators do enforce a "medical loss ratio", requiring insurance companies to pay a certain percentage of their revenue out in claims. So if people do adopt a "healthy" lifestyle and medical costs go down, then insurance rates will drop.
"We hereby decriminalize all formerly controlled substances, and return to the Citizens their God-given right to plant, harvest, process, manufacture, buy, sell, snort, inject, swallow and/or smoke whatever narcotic, toxic, psychoactive, carcinogenic, radioactive, caustic, fungal or fecal matter they wish, as long as they limit exposure to willing, opt-in participants only."
You're missing one thing:
"And we agree to opt out of any health insurance coverage for complications arising from such use, or alternatively, will register such use with insurance companies and pay an additional premium".
I don't care if someone wants to snort himself into a drug induced coma with permanent brain damage, but I don't want to pay for his hospital stay and a lifetime of care with my health insurance premiums or taxes.
That sounds like how you'd do a normal stop, how do you do a panic stop?
And note that I've lifted the rear wheel of my motorcycle off the ground in a panic stop, so even if it tilts you all the way back so your back is touching the ground, it seems that you'd have limited stopping torque available.
Before they invent a better TV, can they just come out with a better cable box? One that doesn't take 3 or 4 seconds to change channels (I know digital tuning takes time, how about 3 tuners that auto-tune the next channel up and down so when I'm flipping through channels, it changes instantly to the next channel). And one where scrolling through the program guide doesn't take forever. I'd be happy to give up the inane live-video previews on the channel guide if that meant that when I hit the page down button 5 times, the program guide could keep up and actually scroll down 5 pages instead of struggling to scroll one page making me wait for each page to paint before it will let me page down to the next page.
I don't have any cable-card capable TV's, do they work any better than the cable-company supplied cable box?
Are you serious? If so, I'd love to get a look at your bank statements...
What if I said I had $240B in my mythical IT bank account?
So that's $7.2 billion... Just for the wages of the people executing the change. Then somebody has to "architect" the project and for consultants those fees are often 25+% of the project... so let's say: $7.2 billion * 1.25 = $9,000,000,000.
So let's say it is "only" $9 billion. This "isn't a lot" for a government, but it isn't the government who needs to pony up. It's billions of individuals and businesses
Ok, let's say that it's $9B just in the USA (though I assume that 40,000 man-year figure was worldwide since IPv6 it doesn't do much good if only a portion of the internet converts over). Spread it over 3 years, and it's $3B/year.
You seem to be underestimating the resources that are available. Total IT spending in the USA is around $500B:
So you're talking about 0.6% of IT budgets going to IPv6 upgrades.
Their internet does everything they think it should....And if they go to IPv6 they have to take steps to access resources that "just work" today under IPv4... What's the motivation?
Companies had nothing to gain from using NAT IPv4 firewalls either (and NAT introduces a lot of complexity with many protocols - IPSec, SIP, h.323, etc) yet they did it anyway. There's nothing (aside from IP address scarcity) stopping a company from using public IP's for all of their workstations with a firewall in front. Once the world starts migrating to IPv6, then there will be incentive to migrate as IPv6-only services become common.
I don't think the attacker is so much interested in the "sudo service apache2 restart" command but rather the response to the password prompt immediately following...
If he can break the RSA key exchange to get to the symmetric key encrypting my session, he can already log in as me, he doesn't need the password. But unless he gets his quantum computer within the next 90 days, I'll have already changed the password.
Why is everyone still happy with SSH and RSA with the specter of a quantum menace lurking just around the corner?"
Because the sky isn't falling, chicken little?
I use SSH to keep someone from snooping my password, or hijacking my session to take over my servers.
I'm not so worried that someone is recording all of my SSH streams for future use in the hope that Quantum Computing becomes a reality and they can decode the stream and see that I typed "sudo service apache2 restart".
I'm more interested in finding out what kind of data you're protecting that needs to remain private for a century. A century ago, telephones were new and uncommon in homes (a few million phones existed, but no transatlantic lines, there was no dialing -- calls were placed through manual exchanges where a switchboard operator manually connected the callers), there was no TV, there were no commercial radio broadcasts. Electricity to the home was uncommon except to the wealthy in urban areas.
I'd really like to know what kind of information you have that still needs to be a secret in the year 2111 when we'll all be driving fusion powered flying time traveling cars and vacationing in hotels on the Moon and Mars and carrying petabyes of data on our iMicrosoftPods with end-to-end DRM that terminates in chip implanted in our brains.
If you have a Solaris cloud that is scalable and reliable, why do you need an Azure fallback?
This question, at least, is easy. There's no such thing as "too big to fail". If you ever have to start counting your nines on more than one hand or you have to start planning for century events, you might need to think about multiple redundant hosting. The hosting company could fail or be shut down by court order, or the hosting location could be hit by natural disaster, or there could be a catastrophic accident. What if the Asian slice of the global database you're mandated by law and by mission to have always available is located in Fukushima because the power supply was convenient?
I don't understand your answer. Solaris and Azure are not hosting providers, they are technologies. You can have geographical diversity with either one.
i thought the whole point of cloud servers was that when the load peaks, it's easy to spin up additional servers, so it doesn't really matter what the performance of any individual server is?
The better each individual server performs, the less you have to pay for more of them.
But at $1000/socket for Solaris), even an extra 50% performance benefit is lost in the licensing costs. (does Solaris really cost that much? That's the only price I could find out Oracle's website). A 2 socket X2270 Sunfire is around $3000 more than an equivalent Dell.
What platform are you running Solaris on? Last time I ran it on an x86 platform (which admittedly was over 6 years ago), performance under load was worse than a comparable Linux box. (at the time, I blamed it on the NIC drivers).
i thought the whole point of cloud servers was that when the load peaks, it's easy to spin up additional servers, so it doesn't really matter what the performance of any individual server is?
How is Azure a fallback for Solaris+Cloud hosting? If you have a Solaris cloud that is scalable and reliable, why do you need an Azure fallback?
But generally, scalable cloud hosting really is good for hosting big traffic sites.
But why is Solaris more suitable to having cloud hosted servers than Linux? While I can see why Solaris zones would make my own private cloud easier to implement, I can have a script spin up EC2 Linux instances on demand and have them serving traffic within minutes. Why would Solaris be any better at that?
Is this really worth it? It covers about 25% of the front torso (and 0% of the back) assuming it's held perfectly vertical and not tipped over horizontally for reading. So there's still a 75% chance of getting shot in the torso (or a 89% chance if you include the possibility of being shot in the back).
In comparison, a bullet proof vest gives nearly 100% coverage of the torso and back.
If a cop is worried enough about being shot that he wants to carry this shield, why doesn't he just wear a vest and get much better protection (yes, I know a vest is heavy and uncomfortable, but getting shot is uncomfortable too)? Or carry a much bigger shield (with a notepad mount on the back) to give better protection?
Sounds like it's just a way to get police departments to spend $150 on a clipboard instead of $4. I'm all for spending money to enhance safety, but this sounds like it's just going to provide a false sense of security and perhaps make it less likely that a cop will wear his vest since he has this clipboad.
Converting all of the internet would require 40,000 man-years of labor to complete... Conservatively
Is that a lot? There must be hundreds of thousands of CCNA's out there. Plus hundreds of thousands more network professionals without a cert.
So when you have a few hundred thousand people to spread the work around to, 40,000 man-years doesn't seem like much work, it could easily be done in a few years.
Why wouldn't someone want end-to-end connectivity across the internet? I have 3 webcams at home, I'd love to just access them directly with a simple IP address instead of having to deal with PAT on my edge router. Granted, I don't necessarily need to connect to every device on the internet, but there are a few specific devices that I *do* want to connect to, and I want to connect to them no matter where I am whether at work, via mobile, or while traveling. When mom calls, I don't want her to have to install a private WAN link (which is rather expensive) or set up a VPN connection just to show her the cat sitting on the back deck.
My company's attorney asked me if we needed to register all of our domains under their "Register your brand with.XXX so someone else doesn't" program. I told them that while we could do that, there's no reason why someone would want to use our domain for porn, and even if they wanted to, they could register under.org,.net,.info, or one of the dozens of country domains available to anyone (some domain speculator already grabbed our.org and.net domains). I asked him if he was prepared to spend thousands of dollars/year preemptively registering our domain and common mispellings across all available TLD's on the off chance that some porn operator thought that our company's would be attractive to people looking for porn (our company's name is associated more with industrial products than big bouncing boobs). I think he finally understood why this.xxx preregistration was such a scam.
the _real_ point is however that relying on "pure electric" is just.. madness, it really is. hybrids are the middle-ground compromise, but doing a really good job, by designing a decent aerodynamic shape, that's where i want to get to. so, i'm going ahead and designing exactly that: a decent aerodynamic bodyshell for use on an EV series-hybrid car.
Unfortunately, people don't *want* super lightweight, super aerodynamic cars. Few people want to be on the road in a 300kg low to the ground plastic bodied car when the guy behind him is in a big 2500kg SUV. Those people that *are* comfortable in that situation are probably on a motorcycle already... or a bicycle.
Corbin Motors had an interesting electric vehicle, but it wasn't commercially viable:
But getting people to use them for everyday transportation is the hard part.
The reason current hybrids look like regular cars is because people *want* regular cars and expect a certain amount of utility and safety from their car.
it's so strange to have access to some basic maths, to have done vehicle simulations and also have an environmentally-friendly hat on, it catches me unawares when i see things like this. i have to double-take for a second, because it's so incredibly strange for EVs to have on-board either high-explosive materials (lithium) or highly toxic metals (nickel) in such huge quantities, i really can't understand why people don't understand that batteries are a storage mechanism not a power source, and don't design vehicles accordingly.
Huh?
Is the Lithium in LiIon batteries as explosive as other common fuels used in cars? (i.e. gasoline, natural gas)
I wasn't aware that Nickel metal was considered highly toxic since it's widely used to make coins and jewelry (and yes, some people are sensitive to Nickel, but it's still in wide use)
In the context of a car, how is a battery not a power source? Likewise, how is my gas tank not an energy storage mechanism? My car needs some source of stored energy to run - the battery and/or gas tank provide a source for that energy.
How would you design a car to accommodate a power source as opposed to a storage mechanism?
there's quite a lot involved, so please forgive me dear slashdot reader for not cut/pasting it all here - here's a link http://lkcl.net/ev to relevant articles and so on. some insights are also on http://hybridcar.com/
How about giving us a hint about what your point is? The http://hybridcar.com/ link is down.
I heard that there's a similar move afoot by retailers across the nation. They are tired of having to police their own stores for shoplifting, and their research shows that most thieves make their getaway in an automobile, so they are going to force automakers to include merchandise antitheft scanners in all cars. They are tired of automakers making all of that profit from stolen goods. If someone enters a car with a product that hadn't had the antitheft tag deactivated, the car will immediately explode.
They think its unlikely that any innocent people will be caught but even if they are, it's for the sake of profits so it needs to be done.
I don't think you understand the purpose of the barometer - it's to allow a faster GPS lock. On more than one occasion, I've entered a new destination into my phone while in a new town, exited a parking garage and then have to guess which way to go while I wait for the phone to get a GPS lock.
I have to call you out on this; it makes little sense to me. The phone already has a rough idea of where it is from cell tower triangulation.
Your approach would sam to be to do a power hungry full-on GPS scan every time the barometer shifted by much from the last setting. So what happens when you go into a tightly sealed building with a powerful HVAC? Or up an elevator 10 floors? All it would seem to do in everyday life is act as a battery drain for far less benefit than cell-tower triangulation gives you.
Even if it makes little sense to you, that doesn't keep it from being true. While the phone has a rough 2-D idea of where it is, the barometer adds a third dimension. I don't know what you mean about a "power hungry full-on GPS scan every time the barometer shifted by much" - the barometer is only used to get an initial lock, once GPS is locked, then there's no need to consult the barometer. And if the barometer is wrong due to environmental conditions, then it just means that the GPS lock will take longer.
But you don't have to believe me, listen to a Google Android engineer:
Slashdot Mirror
You dont pay for other people who are unhealthy. In fact, its all the people who abuse the health insurance by being to healthy that keep the rates high. People who go to the doctor every time they get a little snifflle and get prescription drugs for everything under the son even though they dont really need them. I know people who go to the doctors 50+ times a year and are completely healthy. They are not healthy just because they go to the doctor so much, but that is a lot of wasted money for going to the doctors for no reason.
What country are you in? The days of unlimited free office visits have long passed for most people in the USA - the $35 copay I have to pay every time I see a doctor goes a long way toward limiting my office visits. Do you have any evidence that wellness visits are driving up healthcare costs? I've seen lots of talk about defensive medicine causing unnecessary healthcare costs and end-of-life care driving up healthcare costs (something like 25% of healthcare expenditures are spent on patients in the last year of their life), but I haven't seen any statistics pointing to wellness visits as being responsible for high healthcare costs. It seems that the inconvenience alone of seeing a doctor would keep unnecessary visits to a minimum.
There is nothing to indicate you would be charged less is everyone suddenly adopted a healthy lifestyle - whatever that means. I expect heath care costs and taxation to continue along the path of "all the traffic will bear". With some good spin-doctoring like you spouted to keep people docile.
State insurance regulators do enforce a "medical loss ratio", requiring insurance companies to pay a certain percentage of their revenue out in claims. So if people do adopt a "healthy" lifestyle and medical costs go down, then insurance rates will drop.
Or a pen.
"We hereby decriminalize all formerly controlled substances, and return to the Citizens their God-given right to plant, harvest, process, manufacture, buy, sell, snort, inject, swallow and/or smoke whatever narcotic, toxic, psychoactive, carcinogenic, radioactive, caustic, fungal or fecal matter they wish, as long as they limit exposure to willing, opt-in participants only."
You're missing one thing:
"And we agree to opt out of any health insurance coverage for complications arising from such use, or alternatively, will register such use with insurance companies and pay an additional premium".
I don't care if someone wants to snort himself into a drug induced coma with permanent brain damage, but I don't want to pay for his hospital stay and a lifetime of care with my health insurance premiums or taxes.
Physical dials and switches aren't exactly a new idea...
http://www.hardware-reselling.de/ProductLinks/sgi_dials_and_buttons_box.shtml
Computer control to tilt you back.
That sounds like how you'd do a normal stop, how do you do a panic stop?
And note that I've lifted the rear wheel of my motorcycle off the ground in a panic stop, so even if it tilts you all the way back so your back is touching the ground, it seems that you'd have limited stopping torque available.
Computer control to tilt you back.
That sounds like how you'd do a normal stop, how do you do a panic stop?
With a 25mph top speed, how do you stop it in a hurry without ending up face down on the ground?
Before they invent a better TV, can they just come out with a better cable box? One that doesn't take 3 or 4 seconds to change channels (I know digital tuning takes time, how about 3 tuners that auto-tune the next channel up and down so when I'm flipping through channels, it changes instantly to the next channel). And one where scrolling through the program guide doesn't take forever. I'd be happy to give up the inane live-video previews on the channel guide if that meant that when I hit the page down button 5 times, the program guide could keep up and actually scroll down 5 pages instead of struggling to scroll one page making me wait for each page to paint before it will let me page down to the next page.
I don't have any cable-card capable TV's, do they work any better than the cable-company supplied cable box?
Are you serious? If so, I'd love to get a look at your bank statements...
What if I said I had $240B in my mythical IT bank account?
So that's $7.2 billion... Just for the wages of the people executing the change. Then somebody has to "architect" the project and for consultants those fees are often 25+% of the project... so let's say:
$7.2 billion * 1.25 = $9,000,000,000.
So let's say it is "only" $9 billion. This "isn't a lot" for a government, but it isn't the government who needs to pony up. It's billions of individuals and businesses
Ok, let's say that it's $9B just in the USA (though I assume that 40,000 man-year figure was worldwide since IPv6 it doesn't do much good if only a portion of the internet converts over). Spread it over 3 years, and it's $3B/year.
You seem to be underestimating the resources that are available. Total IT spending in the USA is around $500B:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/desktop/224202347
So you're talking about 0.6% of IT budgets going to IPv6 upgrades.
Their internet does everything they think it should. ...And if they go to IPv6 they have to take steps to access resources that "just work" today under IPv4... What's the motivation?
Companies had nothing to gain from using NAT IPv4 firewalls either (and NAT introduces a lot of complexity with many protocols - IPSec, SIP, h.323, etc) yet they did it anyway. There's nothing (aside from IP address scarcity) stopping a company from using public IP's for all of their workstations with a firewall in front. Once the world starts migrating to IPv6, then there will be incentive to migrate as IPv6-only services become common.
I don't think the attacker is so much interested in the "sudo service apache2 restart" command but rather the response to the password prompt immediately following...
If he can break the RSA key exchange to get to the symmetric key encrypting my session, he can already log in as me, he doesn't need the password. But unless he gets his quantum computer within the next 90 days, I'll have already changed the password.
Why is everyone still happy with SSH and RSA with the specter of a quantum menace lurking just around the corner?"
Because the sky isn't falling, chicken little?
I use SSH to keep someone from snooping my password, or hijacking my session to take over my servers.
I'm not so worried that someone is recording all of my SSH streams for future use in the hope that Quantum Computing becomes a reality and they can decode the stream and see that I typed "sudo service apache2 restart".
I'm more interested in finding out what kind of data you're protecting that needs to remain private for a century. A century ago, telephones were new and uncommon in homes (a few million phones existed, but no transatlantic lines, there was no dialing -- calls were placed through manual exchanges where a switchboard operator manually connected the callers), there was no TV, there were no commercial radio broadcasts. Electricity to the home was uncommon except to the wealthy in urban areas.
I'd really like to know what kind of information you have that still needs to be a secret in the year 2111 when we'll all be driving fusion powered flying time traveling cars and vacationing in hotels on the Moon and Mars and carrying petabyes of data on our iMicrosoftPods with end-to-end DRM that terminates in chip implanted in our brains.
If you have a Solaris cloud that is scalable and reliable, why do you need an Azure fallback?
This question, at least, is easy. There's no such thing as "too big to fail". If you ever have to start counting your nines on more than one hand or you have to start planning for century events, you might need to think about multiple redundant hosting. The hosting company could fail or be shut down by court order, or the hosting location could be hit by natural disaster, or there could be a catastrophic accident. What if the Asian slice of the global database you're mandated by law and by mission to have always available is located in Fukushima because the power supply was convenient?
I don't understand your answer. Solaris and Azure are not hosting providers, they are technologies. You can have geographical diversity with either one.
i thought the whole point of cloud servers was that when the load peaks, it's easy to spin up additional servers, so it doesn't really matter what the performance of any individual server is?
The better each individual server performs, the less you have to pay for more of them.
But at $1000/socket for Solaris), even an extra 50% performance benefit is lost in the licensing costs. (does Solaris really cost that much? That's the only price I could find out Oracle's website). A 2 socket X2270 Sunfire is around $3000 more than an equivalent Dell.
For starters it's better because you don't have to call it GNU/Solaris.
Oracle Solaris is better?
What platform are you running Solaris on? Last time I ran it on an x86 platform (which admittedly was over 6 years ago), performance under load was worse than a comparable Linux box. (at the time, I blamed it on the NIC drivers).
i thought the whole point of cloud servers was that when the load peaks, it's easy to spin up additional servers, so it doesn't really matter what the performance of any individual server is?
How is Azure a fallback for Solaris+Cloud hosting? If you have a Solaris cloud that is scalable and reliable, why do you need an Azure fallback?
But generally, scalable cloud hosting really is good for hosting big traffic sites.
But why is Solaris more suitable to having cloud hosted servers than Linux? While I can see why Solaris zones would make my own private cloud easier to implement, I can have a script spin up EC2 Linux instances on demand and have them serving traffic within minutes. Why would Solaris be any better at that?
Is this really worth it? It covers about 25% of the front torso (and 0% of the back) assuming it's held perfectly vertical and not tipped over horizontally for reading. So there's still a 75% chance of getting shot in the torso (or a 89% chance if you include the possibility of being shot in the back).
In comparison, a bullet proof vest gives nearly 100% coverage of the torso and back.
If a cop is worried enough about being shot that he wants to carry this shield, why doesn't he just wear a vest and get much better protection (yes, I know a vest is heavy and uncomfortable, but getting shot is uncomfortable too)? Or carry a much bigger shield (with a notepad mount on the back) to give better protection?
Sounds like it's just a way to get police departments to spend $150 on a clipboard instead of $4. I'm all for spending money to enhance safety, but this sounds like it's just going to provide a false sense of security and perhaps make it less likely that a cop will wear his vest since he has this clipboad.
Converting all of the internet would require 40,000 man-years of labor to complete... Conservatively
Is that a lot? There must be hundreds of thousands of CCNA's out there. Plus hundreds of thousands more network professionals without a cert.
So when you have a few hundred thousand people to spread the work around to, 40,000 man-years doesn't seem like much work, it could easily be done in a few years.
Why wouldn't someone want end-to-end connectivity across the internet? I have 3 webcams at home, I'd love to just access them directly with a simple IP address instead of having to deal with PAT on my edge router. Granted, I don't necessarily need to connect to every device on the internet, but there are a few specific devices that I *do* want to connect to, and I want to connect to them no matter where I am whether at work, via mobile, or while traveling. When mom calls, I don't want her to have to install a private WAN link (which is rather expensive) or set up a VPN connection just to show her the cat sitting on the back deck.
My company's attorney asked me if we needed to register all of our domains under their "Register your brand with .XXX so someone else doesn't" program. I told them that while we could do that, there's no reason why someone would want to use our domain for porn, and even if they wanted to, they could register under .org, .net, .info, or one of the dozens of country domains available to anyone (some domain speculator already grabbed our .org and .net domains). I asked him if he was prepared to spend thousands of dollars/year preemptively registering our domain and common mispellings across all available TLD's on the off chance that some porn operator thought that our company's would be attractive to people looking for porn (our company's name is associated more with industrial products than big bouncing boobs). I think he finally understood why this .xxx preregistration was such a scam.
the _real_ point is however that relying on "pure electric" is just.. madness, it really is. hybrids are the middle-ground compromise, but doing a really good job, by designing a decent aerodynamic shape, that's where i want to get to. so, i'm going ahead and designing exactly that: a decent aerodynamic bodyshell for use on an EV series-hybrid car.
Unfortunately, people don't *want* super lightweight, super aerodynamic cars. Few people want to be on the road in a 300kg low to the ground plastic bodied car when the guy behind him is in a big 2500kg SUV. Those people that *are* comfortable in that situation are probably on a motorcycle already... or a bicycle.
Corbin Motors had an interesting electric vehicle, but it wasn't commercially viable:
http://www.corbinsparrow.com/
There are plenty of super aerodynamic prototypes around. Here's one 200mpg car:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/14/aptera-takes-wraps-off-200-mpg-prototype-car/
But getting people to use them for everyday transportation is the hard part.
The reason current hybrids look like regular cars is because people *want* regular cars and expect a certain amount of utility and safety from their car.
This survey says that 51% of people have a 10 mile or less commute:
http://www.bts.gov/publications/omnistats/volume_03_issue_04/html/figure_02.html
it's so strange to have access to some basic maths, to have done vehicle simulations and also have an environmentally-friendly hat on, it catches me unawares when i see things like this. i have to double-take for a second, because it's so incredibly strange for EVs to have on-board either high-explosive materials (lithium) or highly toxic metals (nickel) in such huge quantities, i really can't understand why people don't understand that batteries are a storage mechanism not a power source, and don't design vehicles accordingly.
Huh?
Is the Lithium in LiIon batteries as explosive as other common fuels used in cars? (i.e. gasoline, natural gas)
I wasn't aware that Nickel metal was considered highly toxic since it's widely used to make coins and jewelry (and yes, some people are sensitive to Nickel, but it's still in wide use)
In the context of a car, how is a battery not a power source? Likewise, how is my gas tank not an energy storage mechanism? My car needs some source of stored energy to run - the battery and/or gas tank provide a source for that energy.
How would you design a car to accommodate a power source as opposed to a storage mechanism?
there's quite a lot involved, so please forgive me dear slashdot reader for not cut/pasting it all here - here's a link http://lkcl.net/ev to relevant articles and so on. some insights are also on http://hybridcar.com/
How about giving us a hint about what your point is? The http://hybridcar.com/ link is down.
How does a radio telescope image tell us that an object is "darker than coal"? Unless they meant "Has radio reflectivity less than that of coal"?
I heard that there's a similar move afoot by retailers across the nation. They are tired of having to police their own stores for shoplifting, and their research shows that most thieves make their getaway in an automobile, so they are going to force automakers to include merchandise antitheft scanners in all cars. They are tired of automakers making all of that profit from stolen goods. If someone enters a car with a product that hadn't had the antitheft tag deactivated, the car will immediately explode.
They think its unlikely that any innocent people will be caught but even if they are, it's for the sake of profits so it needs to be done.
I don't think you understand the purpose of the barometer - it's to allow a faster GPS lock. On more than one occasion, I've entered a new destination into my phone while in a new town, exited a parking garage and then have to guess which way to go while I wait for the phone to get a GPS lock.
I have to call you out on this; it makes little sense to me. The phone already has a rough idea of where it is from cell tower triangulation.
Your approach would sam to be to do a power hungry full-on GPS scan every time the barometer shifted by much from the last setting. So what happens when you go into a tightly sealed building with a powerful HVAC? Or up an elevator 10 floors? All it would seem to do in everyday life is act as a battery drain for far less benefit than cell-tower triangulation gives you.
Even if it makes little sense to you, that doesn't keep it from being true. While the phone has a rough 2-D idea of where it is, the barometer adds a third dimension. I don't know what you mean about a "power hungry full-on GPS scan every time the barometer shifted by much" - the barometer is only used to get an initial lock, once GPS is locked, then there's no need to consult the barometer. And if the barometer is wrong due to environmental conditions, then it just means that the GPS lock will take longer.
But you don't have to believe me, listen to a Google Android engineer:
https://plus.google.com/112413860260589530492/posts/jVJhPyouWDP
It's been widely reported in the press:
https://www.google.com/search?gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=android+gps+lock+barometer