And you just pointed out one of the problems. A 60 KWh pack is just a touch too small for me. I'm glad that I have the option of packs in the 70-100 KWh range. Standardizing on a pack now will just hold back the technology.
Who said anything about an hour or two? Typical Supercharge times are more like 20-30 minutes. And the reason people prefer it is because it's cheaper. Battery swap stations will always require more infrastructure, so the cost per KWh will be higher. Battery swap also only works well if everyone has a standard swappable battery, and cars simply don't all come in the same size.
What do California, West Virginia, and Mississippi have in common? They're the states that do not give any non-medical exemptions for vaccination. So it's well-established that we don't have to grant exemptions. It's time to stop.
I just want to ignore the whole thing. If someone who chose not to get vaccinated gets sick, just give them some healing crystals and leave them alone.
But unfortunately, not everyone who gets sick will be by choice. The vaccines aren't 100%, so some people may get sick even with immunization. Some infants are too young to get vaccinated, and they can easily die if they get sick. Some people have medical conditions that prevent immunization, and they are also at serious risk.
So much as I would like to ignore the sick and tell them "I told you so," we just can't do that. Also, it's not fair to not take care of kids just because their parents are stupid.
It's time to say get a vaccine or don't go to public schools. The only exceptions should be kids with compromised immune systems that can't be vaccinated. If parents don't like it, they can save the schools money and homeschool.
Well, this ignores urban chargers for people who can't charge at home. (Those can work on a subscription basis, and should have sufficient demand to keep prices down.)
As to the viability of high-speed chargers along highways for travel, we're not looking at 0.1% market share, we're investing for the future with a much higher market share. I don't know the numbers, but once installed, a charging station requires very little maintenance, and the operating cost is just the electricity. So the break-even price would be the installation cost divided by the utilization (over something like ten years), rent for the space divided by the utilization, plus the electricity cost. Add on some profit, and you have the price. The real issue is whether demand is going to spike with electric cars dominating the market in the coming years, or if they'll fail and remain a minor portion. Those building stations now are betting that EVs will dominate. One thing they need to do is price charging based on what they expect utilization to be in the future, so they don't scare people away from EVs now. The math is correct that these stations can't operate at a profit right now, but long term that's not true.
One thing they need to do is get around the peak demand charges that drive prices way up for charging stations. This can be accomplished with batteries (and possibly solar), or through negotiations with utilities and regulators.
If he asked the same question of Elon Musk, he would have had a yes. Of course, Elon has a long track record of missing deadlines, but if SpaceX didn't have to use profits from regular launches to fund their Starship program, they could probably move it forward faster.
I don't know the technical process, but the carriers have never had a problem keeping my phone number when I switched phones. They have to do something on their end to switch it over, but it's essentially painless for me. I assume the carrier just changes which SIM card ID is associated with my account.
I see a lot of complaints, but this really isn't unreasonable for many people. Let's take the various points one-by-one:
* No headphone jack. I never use headphones with my phone, so it's not an issue for me. Many people only use Bluetooth headphones, so it's not an issue for them. Yes, it does eliminate people who really want to use their old headphones. Yes, this is a market-restricting decision.
* Wireless charging only If you've switched over to wireless charging already, this isn't a big deal. It does mean you're out of luck if you suddenly need to charge when traveling and all you have is a USB port unless you start bringing a wireless charger with you, and that's a pain. We're heading towards the day when wireless charging pads will be as common as USB ports, but we're not there yet. This is a bit ahead of its time, but once Starbucks and the like all have wireless charging pads in the tables, this may become standard.
* No data port.
While the port is the same as the charging port, using the USB port for data transfer is a completely different use, so it should be discussed separately. I can't think of the last time I used a data cable with a phone except when manually installing firmware (which was last week). There's really no reason to expect normal users to need a data cable.
* No SIM card
Well, obviously it has a built-in SIM card, so this is really no removable SIM card. In all the years I've owned a cell phone, I've only needed to move the SIM card once, and that was because the provider didn't send a new one with the new phone. I don't think many consumers care one bit about this. Yes, it is a big issue for international travelers who will want to switch cards.
* Battery, SD Card
This has been beaten to death with other phones already.
Ultimately the question is what do they gain by removing all this stuff. It makes the phone less expensive to make. It may make the phone more reliable. It may make room for the phone to be smaller or have a larger battery. None of that really matters to me.
So the removed features don't bother me much, but I also don't see the advantage for me.
You may not have anything better to spend your money on, but I certainly don't want to waste money. I don't want to pay for international roaming when I only want to call from my hotel with included free WiFi. I don't want to pay for any service for an old phone that I send with my kid to the library to call me when he wants to be picked up. This isn't about using VoIP instead of limited cellular minutes, it's about using VoIP instead of paying for any service whatsoever.
I use a proxy auto-config file to filter out ads. It used to work perfectly, but thanks to one change, it's little better than a hosts file now: They decided that passing the full URL to the PAC file was a security issue for https sites. Now I can't filter out ads from the same server as real content since almost everything is https now. Fortunately, most ads are on separate servers, so it still works. In a pinch, there is a browser setting that will tell it to send the full URLs, and I might switch that on if I find a site that is particularly annoying. The advantage the PAC file has is that I can use a magic URL as a flag to turn ad blocking on or off as needed, such as to test if a page display error is due to the blocking.
For me, Google Voice is the big issue. I can install Hangouts and the Hangouts Dialer, sign up for a Google Voice number, and then my phone works as a phone anywhere I have WiFi, and it's totally free. This is wonderful for overseas travel. It's also great for setting up an old phone for occasional special uses, or for a kid to have a phone to call from school.
I don't really care about Hangouts, and the summary suggests that it won't be retired until the Voice integration with Chat is completed, so presumably I can just switch over, and I'm happy with that.
I'm under the impression that royalties are per-play. So if songs are shorter, fans will listen to more songs, many of them from the same record company, so the record company wants shorter songs.
I would think that royalties should be for the amount of time streamed. If your song is six minutes long, you get twice the royalties of a three minute song, but only if it's streamed as many times and listed to all the way through. (And if someone skips, they get the royalties for the portion listened to.)
Someone who knows exactly how the royalties work should correct me if I'm wrong or confirm my theory.
My understanding is that the airline didn't subscribe to the service, so the airplane wasn't talking to the satellite network, even though it did have the technology included.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S3, which has a 32-bit processor. In fact, the first 64-bit CPU in the series was with the S6. The S5 is still a very nice phone. It would be a shame if something happened to it's apps. It's particularly annoying if I want to install something that I know I had on it once, but it says it's no longer compatible, and the older compatible version is long gone.
I fully understand wanting to have everything work in a 64-bit only world, but at the same time, they should strive to avoid obsoleting older equipment without good reason.
We have gas heat and gas hot water, but with solar hot water to pre-heat the water. If we were doing new construction, I would consider geothermal heat, which would shift it over to electric, but retrofitting geothermal just isn't an option for us.
Solar can easily produce all the electricity we need for regular household purposes. That excludes industrial uses. Whether it can include EV charging is a matter for debate. Obviously this isn't true on an individual level in cases like yours, but on a state-wide basis, overproduction elsewhere could easily cover your use.
Wind can cover a good chunk of industrial and EV charging use, but as you point out, switching to electricity for hot water and building heat is a huge additional load (as is switching everyone over to EVs), and you're probably right that nuclear needs to be the answer if we're to eliminate fossil fuels entirely.
Of course for new construction, geothermal and better design can cut way down on the electricity needs, but we need to heat the buildings we've already built.
As to EVs making sense, it's just a matter of time before apartment owners find they have to install chargers to stay in business. Likewise, fast charging networks like Tesla's Superchargers will make long distance travel no longer an issue (along with longer base ranges that we're starting to see now). So in a few years when every apartment building has EV charging, and every EV has a range and charging network comparable to what Tesla has, things will be very different. (And of course, assuming battery prices continue to drop as expected.)
Of course there are other issues. Like if everyone generates their own power most of the time, how do we pay for the electric grid to redistribute power when needed? And that answer might drive everyone to install home batteries (e.g., Powerwalls), making it further complicated to pay for the grid.
The first solar array we did was in 2009, and it had a fairly long payback period. We're still probably not quite even on it. The second (east-facing) was in 2015, and it should break even this year due to better state incentives and a lower initial cost. I was surprised just how well an east-facing arry does.
The state incentive program makes a huge difference, which is why solar is on half the homes in our neighborhood here, and almost nowhere in some other states.
As someone who lives in Massachusetts and has solar, depending on your home, it may be completely practical to eliminate your electric bill with solar roof panels. First you do the stupidly simple stuff like switching all your lights to LEDs to minimize your electric use, but aside from that, if you have a good sunny roof, you can easily eliminate your summer and possibly even winter electric bills. Even with two electric cars, we don't have electric bills in the summer.
It's entirely practical even in regions as far north as Massachusetts to build homes with a net-zero electric usage, especially if the builder takes the roof orientation into account. Older homes can be more tricky depending on the architecture, shading, vents, and such.
All that said, I agree that nuclear is a fine option for the base of the grid.
I'm also on Oreo (Samsung S8 on AT&T). So either Samsung or AT&T disabled the toggles for WiFi and Mobile data on a per-app basis, because it isn't there for me.
On the plus side for running a VPN, I can also use a hosts file to block ads.
I can turn off background mobile data on a per-app basis, but not data overall. With NetGuard, I can block the network on apps that only use it for advertising or spying, making them fully useful again.
I'm sure I'll soon hit the problem of not being able to run more than one VPN at a time. I also don't like that it means there's always a notification telling me that it's running.
The one you mention says it doesn't support LTE, which makes it rather useless for me. I also like the idea of using open source apps from F-Droid when possible. https://play.google.com/store/...
I want to stop a lot of apps from being able to self-start. For most apps, if I don't click on it, it should never start, but obviously there are exceptions. Whether they're self-starting for nefarious reasons, or for features I'm not interested in, I want them locked down.
Likewise for background operation. Many apps shouldn't be running in the background at all, and I would like the ability to control this.
I also want the ability to turn off network access to apps that don't need it (at least for any feature I'm using). I've started using the NetGuard app that runs as a VPN to give me this feature, but it should be available by default. Remember when Android used to consider network access as an app permission? Bring that back so that I can deny it.
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And you just pointed out one of the problems. A 60 KWh pack is just a touch too small for me. I'm glad that I have the option of packs in the 70-100 KWh range. Standardizing on a pack now will just hold back the technology.
Who said anything about an hour or two? Typical Supercharge times are more like 20-30 minutes. And the reason people prefer it is because it's cheaper. Battery swap stations will always require more infrastructure, so the cost per KWh will be higher. Battery swap also only works well if everyone has a standard swappable battery, and cars simply don't all come in the same size.
What do California, West Virginia, and Mississippi have in common? They're the states that do not give any non-medical exemptions for vaccination. So it's well-established that we don't have to grant exemptions. It's time to stop.
I just want to ignore the whole thing. If someone who chose not to get vaccinated gets sick, just give them some healing crystals and leave them alone.
But unfortunately, not everyone who gets sick will be by choice. The vaccines aren't 100%, so some people may get sick even with immunization. Some infants are too young to get vaccinated, and they can easily die if they get sick. Some people have medical conditions that prevent immunization, and they are also at serious risk.
So much as I would like to ignore the sick and tell them "I told you so," we just can't do that. Also, it's not fair to not take care of kids just because their parents are stupid.
It's time to say get a vaccine or don't go to public schools. The only exceptions should be kids with compromised immune systems that can't be vaccinated. If parents don't like it, they can save the schools money and homeschool.
Well, this ignores urban chargers for people who can't charge at home. (Those can work on a subscription basis, and should have sufficient demand to keep prices down.)
As to the viability of high-speed chargers along highways for travel, we're not looking at 0.1% market share, we're investing for the future with a much higher market share. I don't know the numbers, but once installed, a charging station requires very little maintenance, and the operating cost is just the electricity. So the break-even price would be the installation cost divided by the utilization (over something like ten years), rent for the space divided by the utilization, plus the electricity cost. Add on some profit, and you have the price. The real issue is whether demand is going to spike with electric cars dominating the market in the coming years, or if they'll fail and remain a minor portion. Those building stations now are betting that EVs will dominate. One thing they need to do is price charging based on what they expect utilization to be in the future, so they don't scare people away from EVs now. The math is correct that these stations can't operate at a profit right now, but long term that's not true.
One thing they need to do is get around the peak demand charges that drive prices way up for charging stations. This can be accomplished with batteries (and possibly solar), or through negotiations with utilities and regulators.
Tesla tried battery swap, but found that most people would prefer to just Supercharge.
If he asked the same question of Elon Musk, he would have had a yes. Of course, Elon has a long track record of missing deadlines, but if SpaceX didn't have to use profits from regular launches to fund their Starship program, they could probably move it forward faster.
I don't know the technical process, but the carriers have never had a problem keeping my phone number when I switched phones. They have to do something on their end to switch it over, but it's essentially painless for me. I assume the carrier just changes which SIM card ID is associated with my account.
I see a lot of complaints, but this really isn't unreasonable for many people. Let's take the various points one-by-one:
* No headphone jack.
I never use headphones with my phone, so it's not an issue for me. Many people only use Bluetooth headphones, so it's not an issue for them. Yes, it does eliminate people who really want to use their old headphones. Yes, this is a market-restricting decision.
* Wireless charging only
If you've switched over to wireless charging already, this isn't a big deal. It does mean you're out of luck if you suddenly need to charge when traveling and all you have is a USB port unless you start bringing a wireless charger with you, and that's a pain. We're heading towards the day when wireless charging pads will be as common as USB ports, but we're not there yet. This is a bit ahead of its time, but once Starbucks and the like all have wireless charging pads in the tables, this may become standard.
* No data port.
While the port is the same as the charging port, using the USB port for data transfer is a completely different use, so it should be discussed separately. I can't think of the last time I used a data cable with a phone except when manually installing firmware (which was last week). There's really no reason to expect normal users to need a data cable.
* No SIM card
Well, obviously it has a built-in SIM card, so this is really no removable SIM card. In all the years I've owned a cell phone, I've only needed to move the SIM card once, and that was because the provider didn't send a new one with the new phone. I don't think many consumers care one bit about this. Yes, it is a big issue for international travelers who will want to switch cards.
* Battery, SD Card
This has been beaten to death with other phones already.
Ultimately the question is what do they gain by removing all this stuff. It makes the phone less expensive to make. It may make the phone more reliable. It may make room for the phone to be smaller or have a larger battery. None of that really matters to me.
So the removed features don't bother me much, but I also don't see the advantage for me.
Thank you!
I should have linked to that. I've also added a bunch of sites, but I've never noticed it being slow, so I didn't refactor it.
I think the https issue with not passing full URLs is why it's not blocking YouTube ads, which I may want to look into.
You may not have anything better to spend your money on, but I certainly don't want to waste money. I don't want to pay for international roaming when I only want to call from my hotel with included free WiFi. I don't want to pay for any service for an old phone that I send with my kid to the library to call me when he wants to be picked up. This isn't about using VoIP instead of limited cellular minutes, it's about using VoIP instead of paying for any service whatsoever.
I use a proxy auto-config file to filter out ads. It used to work perfectly, but thanks to one change, it's little better than a hosts file now: They decided that passing the full URL to the PAC file was a security issue for https sites. Now I can't filter out ads from the same server as real content since almost everything is https now. Fortunately, most ads are on separate servers, so it still works. In a pinch, there is a browser setting that will tell it to send the full URLs, and I might switch that on if I find a site that is particularly annoying. The advantage the PAC file has is that I can use a magic URL as a flag to turn ad blocking on or off as needed, such as to test if a page display error is due to the blocking.
For me, Google Voice is the big issue. I can install Hangouts and the Hangouts Dialer, sign up for a Google Voice number, and then my phone works as a phone anywhere I have WiFi, and it's totally free. This is wonderful for overseas travel. It's also great for setting up an old phone for occasional special uses, or for a kid to have a phone to call from school.
I don't really care about Hangouts, and the summary suggests that it won't be retired until the Voice integration with Chat is completed, so presumably I can just switch over, and I'm happy with that.
I'm under the impression that royalties are per-play. So if songs are shorter, fans will listen to more songs, many of them from the same record company, so the record company wants shorter songs.
I would think that royalties should be for the amount of time streamed. If your song is six minutes long, you get twice the royalties of a three minute song, but only if it's streamed as many times and listed to all the way through. (And if someone skips, they get the royalties for the portion listened to.)
Someone who knows exactly how the royalties work should correct me if I'm wrong or confirm my theory.
My understanding is that the airline didn't subscribe to the service, so the airplane wasn't talking to the satellite network, even though it did have the technology included.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S3, which has a 32-bit processor. In fact, the first 64-bit CPU in the series was with the S6. The S5 is still a very nice phone. It would be a shame if something happened to it's apps. It's particularly annoying if I want to install something that I know I had on it once, but it says it's no longer compatible, and the older compatible version is long gone.
I fully understand wanting to have everything work in a 64-bit only world, but at the same time, they should strive to avoid obsoleting older equipment without good reason.
We have gas heat and gas hot water, but with solar hot water to pre-heat the water. If we were doing new construction, I would consider geothermal heat, which would shift it over to electric, but retrofitting geothermal just isn't an option for us.
Good points.
Solar can easily produce all the electricity we need for regular household purposes. That excludes industrial uses. Whether it can include EV charging is a matter for debate. Obviously this isn't true on an individual level in cases like yours, but on a state-wide basis, overproduction elsewhere could easily cover your use.
Wind can cover a good chunk of industrial and EV charging use, but as you point out, switching to electricity for hot water and building heat is a huge additional load (as is switching everyone over to EVs), and you're probably right that nuclear needs to be the answer if we're to eliminate fossil fuels entirely.
Of course for new construction, geothermal and better design can cut way down on the electricity needs, but we need to heat the buildings we've already built.
As to EVs making sense, it's just a matter of time before apartment owners find they have to install chargers to stay in business. Likewise, fast charging networks like Tesla's Superchargers will make long distance travel no longer an issue (along with longer base ranges that we're starting to see now). So in a few years when every apartment building has EV charging, and every EV has a range and charging network comparable to what Tesla has, things will be very different. (And of course, assuming battery prices continue to drop as expected.)
Of course there are other issues. Like if everyone generates their own power most of the time, how do we pay for the electric grid to redistribute power when needed? And that answer might drive everyone to install home batteries (e.g., Powerwalls), making it further complicated to pay for the grid.
The first solar array we did was in 2009, and it had a fairly long payback period. We're still probably not quite even on it. The second (east-facing) was in 2015, and it should break even this year due to better state incentives and a lower initial cost. I was surprised just how well an east-facing arry does.
The state incentive program makes a huge difference, which is why solar is on half the homes in our neighborhood here, and almost nowhere in some other states.
As someone who lives in Massachusetts and has solar, depending on your home, it may be completely practical to eliminate your electric bill with solar roof panels. First you do the stupidly simple stuff like switching all your lights to LEDs to minimize your electric use, but aside from that, if you have a good sunny roof, you can easily eliminate your summer and possibly even winter electric bills. Even with two electric cars, we don't have electric bills in the summer.
It's entirely practical even in regions as far north as Massachusetts to build homes with a net-zero electric usage, especially if the builder takes the roof orientation into account. Older homes can be more tricky depending on the architecture, shading, vents, and such.
All that said, I agree that nuclear is a fine option for the base of the grid.
I'm also on Oreo (Samsung S8 on AT&T). So either Samsung or AT&T disabled the toggles for WiFi and Mobile data on a per-app basis, because it isn't there for me.
On the plus side for running a VPN, I can also use a hosts file to block ads.
I can turn off background mobile data on a per-app basis, but not data overall. With NetGuard, I can block the network on apps that only use it for advertising or spying, making them fully useful again.
I suppose the text on the Google Play store refers to an older version or only applies to some LTE networks.
Sounds like essentially the same thing as what I'm using.
https://f-droid.org/en/package...
I'm sure I'll soon hit the problem of not being able to run more than one VPN at a time. I also don't like that it means there's always a notification telling me that it's running.
The one you mention says it doesn't support LTE, which makes it rather useless for me. I also like the idea of using open source apps from F-Droid when possible.
https://play.google.com/store/...
Exactly.
I want to stop a lot of apps from being able to self-start. For most apps, if I don't click on it, it should never start, but obviously there are exceptions. Whether they're self-starting for nefarious reasons, or for features I'm not interested in, I want them locked down.
Likewise for background operation. Many apps shouldn't be running in the background at all, and I would like the ability to control this.
I also want the ability to turn off network access to apps that don't need it (at least for any feature I'm using). I've started using the NetGuard app that runs as a VPN to give me this feature, but it should be available by default. Remember when Android used to consider network access as an app permission? Bring that back so that I can deny it.