I hope this was a joke. All cars have a 2-phase AC charger on board, and the top portion of this connector will always work with a standard AC J1772 plug. Only some cars (and some very special stations) will have the additional circuitry for DC charging, and those will have the additional pins for the DC charging jack. DC charging is much higher power than AC charging (usually supplied by a capacitor bank), and with today's batteries it actually causes significant wear to charge them that fast. So until we get better batteries, DC fast charging is irrelevant to most consumers. It is a shame that policymakers are so obsessed with fast-charging before either the standards or the batteries are actually ready for prime time--that money could be better spent on more useful AC charging stations and public awareness.
Given that there are only a finite number of cops on the road, and some offenses are difficult to detect let alone stop someone for, I assume that means you are in favor of more automated enforcement? Like red light cameras, don't-block-the-fucking-intersection cameras, insurance company dashboard boxes, etc. There are only two options to improve safety: make driver's licenses more like pilot licences in rigor, or make the cars drive themselves. Nissan just got closet to the latter. Just like Google said, self-driving car technology will be introduced slowly until eventually the cars *can* drive themselves.
If you keep a safe distance and always have an out, then this system will never activate. This is so one of those two distracted people's car will save their dumb asses for them. Then they can go home and continue raising their kids into dumbasses instead of them turning into drug dealers when their parents died.
No one seems to have mentioned it yet, but it's worth pointing out that Amazon is presumably buying just the OMAP processor *design* unit, not the manufacturing unit. They will likely still use TI's foundries to make the parts, but Amazon will have control over the architecture and who gets the documentation.
Also worth reinforcing that this is not a bad deal for TI. ARM CPUs are pretty much a commodity product at this point, without much room for differentiation unless you go hog wild with optimizations like Qualcomm has. TI's main business has always been in the low-level ASIC and microcontroller markets, where is has a very large, well-respected variety of parts and continues to improve them.
"Simple relay" doesn't begin to describe what is actually necessary to do what he is suggesting. To truly upgrade the Deep Space Network we need something capable of processing terabytes a day from a variety of existing and yet-to-be launched spacecraft. Not only would it need to buffer all this data until a wide-bandwidth path to Earth opens up, scientists would likely offload a great deal of compression and even science processing to the supercomputer on the moon so that we never have to download the raw data at all.
That is the way Earth-orbiting science missions are moving right now--new high-speed, high-resolution detectors generate so much data it is virtually impossible to download it all to Earth at any where near the rate it is produced, so preprocessing and compression are executed in ever-increasing space-based computing resources. This station on the moon is simply the logical progression as applied to deep space missions, since there is less power for big CPUs on smaller craft located farther from the sun.
It's a cheap way to do two-factor authentication. You need your password, and you also need your graphics card. If either of them is lost or changes, then you have a much more difficult reidentification process. This system has the same vulnerabilities that any two-factor authentication scheme has, but less than many deployed systems. Many banks already use cookies or something to "register" your computer, and ask you extra questions when you logon from a different machine or clear the cookies. Some send you a text message on your phone as a form of two-factor identification, but that's kinda dumb because phones are easily lost or hacked, and available on the person you just tortured to get his password, so now you have everything.
I guess the point is that to the average person, as long as there isn't a war in the streets, life goes on. It's better to have 100 years of mediocrity than 20 years of brilliance, 5 years of bloodshed, and another 20 years of brilliance.
Thing is, I don't see any way to change the patent system short of the moral equivalent of a violent revolution. If we're going to go that far, why not take it a step further so we don't have to do it again in another 50 or 100 years.
The ideal system of government is a benevolent dictator. One person acting with consistent policy and absolute power putting the interests of the majority above special interests and himself. While it is possible to find such a person once every few centuries, it is impossible to maintain this system of government because a bad dictator will inevitably rise and send everything to hell. Every society in the world has gone through the motions of trying to "fix" their monarchy, and suffered revolution after revolution "fixing" their system trying to find a better single ruler. But now, we have realized it was always a losing battle and abandoned the monarchy altogether. Representative governments may be inefficient and suboptimal, but they are stable for the long term and do not require violent "fixes" periodically.
The argument presented by this article is that patent systems behave in the same way. While a "fixed" patent system would be ideal, its corruption inevitably recurs no matter how many times we actually manage to "fix" it because of how it inherently distributes money and influence among the concerned parties. The only solution, therefore, is to abolish the system entirely and use a completely different paradigm to produce suboptimal but stable results. In many industries that may in fact be laissez-faire, while in others we may need different, more targeted approaches.
This. If drug development were offloaded to socialized nonprofit organizations, they would have less incentive to falsify results or push drugs with minimal improvements as "the next big thing". Plus, maybe we would have less of this ridiculous "Talk to your doctor about Xyanoflexanol. May cause blindness, nuclear holocaust and explosive diarrhea" advertising.
You seem to not have read the part of my post where I mention the subsidies, but your point is valid. We can then take the true cost of the electric car and compare it to the true cost of the gas car. This study found the total costs borne by both consumer and taxpayer for every gallon of gasoline burned to be $15.14 in 2007 (if you don't follow the link, they include medical, environmental, and military costs as well). A 2012 study and a 2011 study both found the total cost of dirty coal-fired electricity to be less than 9 cents per kilowatt hour.
Now take your average new compact gasoline car at 28 mpg, and a Nissan LEAF which gets about 3.6 mi/kWh. To go 1000 miles on gas, you burn 35.7 gallons, which equals $540.71 in total societal costs. Now to go those same 1000 miles in the LEAF, on 277.8 kWh of electricity, it costs society $25. The electric car costs just 4.6% of an equivalent gas car when all these factors are taken into account. Over a 100,000 mile life span, the electric car saves $51,571, more than five times the typical production subsidy. The conclusion, then, is that the taxpayer gets an incredible return on investment for electric vehicle subsidies.
If you can find numbers that contradict mine, please post them. I could not find any concrete facts on sites with opposing biases, so I must assume they have motivations other than scientific accuracy.
Their Tesla-based RAV4 EV is apparently still on track, for what limited sales they were planning for it from the beginning, anyway. I'm guessing the iQ is an internally developed drivetrain that is not as sophisticated, and they decided that they cannot bring the price down enough given what its capabilities are. I'm still hopeful that they'll roll out higher-performance vehicles in the future.
That means that a battery with 600 Wh/kg has the same range per kg as a gasoline drive train.
Forgive me for not running the numbers myself, but does that include the smaller weight of the electric drive components, or does that just compare battery weight vs. gasoline weight? If the latter, then you left out a large advantage that electric drive trains have--reduced mechanical components.
A car that has to lug around 500+ pounds of batteries will never be as efficient as a car with a small gas motor.
Do you have any idea how inefficient internal combustion engines are? The average efficiency is around 15% of chemical energy converted to mechanical. Electric drive trains, on the other hand, can be as much as 80% efficient if you include regenerative braking. That's why the EPA equivalent efficiency ratings are 3x better for electric cars than gas, even with the extra weight. Plus, the batteries they are shipping now are expected to have 8-10 year life spans at *least*, not 5.
Call it politically motivated if you like, but reducing our dependence on global oil prices (even if we don't import any of it) and reducing air pollution in cities seem like pretty noble goals to me.
electric vehicles are still much more expensive than equivalent compact cars.
This is a myth caused by sticker shock. The savings on fuel and maintenance more than make up for the added cost. Edmunds.com shows the 5-year "True Cost to Own" of a 2012 Nissan LEAF is $1000 LESS than that of a 2012 Toyota Corolla, and the LEAF is bigger and much more fun to drive. Admittedly, that includes the $7500 federal tax credit, but that is the calculus we currently have to work with. Cost will come down with time. Like you said, many more people could be happy with an electric car if they would just do the math--and take a test drive! Electric cars are amazing.
The other reason for my assumption was that if they really are pointing a dish at a spot on the surface of Mars from earth, then they will need super-precise dish tracking mechanisms. While on second thought that is entirely within NASA's capabilities, and used all the time on radio telescopes, I initially thought they would avoid that type of design.
Sorry, I'm generally familiar with radio physics but not familiar with the degree to which a radio signal can be collimated. I wasn't sure it was possible with a reasonably-sized antenna to form a beam with that little divergence. At least with lasers, a wider beam will diverge less over the same distance, but I assumed it was relative to the wavelength, so a low-divergence radio beam would have to be even wider. Guess I should go ask my buddies in the RF branch, since they actually work on the DSN.
I know it just looks like pork going to a couple states, but the alternative is what we have with the Joint Strike Fighter--the supply chain is fragmented into all 50 states so nobody wants to kill it, but it raises the overall cost of the program substantially. And science is even harder to fragment than manufacturing--scientists need to be able to work together, and with engineers, regularly to make efficient progress.
Not only that, but the ground software likely wasn't even finished when the rover launched. It's standard practice to spend the eight months of transit testing and refining the rover AI and upload it either in flight or after landing. Heck, they might have even patched the flight software at some point before it got near the planet.
Where to point it? That's easy...at the red spot in the sky. No signal from Earth will be collimated enough that it matters *where* on Mars you point it.
You apparently haven't spent much time in Washington DC during the summer. We were among the first adopters of air conditioning because summer is so insufferably hot and humid here. Before AC, the federal government had more "heat days" than snow days, and it was common for people to sleep in bathtubs full of cold water. When the power goes out in the summer in DC, people die from heat-related illnesses with alarming regularity. Most people also are not used to stockpiling non-perishable food, and businesses and public services are out of power in addition to homes, so life can get pretty difficult. Heck, my house has power but no Internet because the Verizon tech can't re-enable it until the central office gets turned back on. So yeah, losing power for a week in an entire region is about a lot more than camping in the basement in a snowstorm.
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I hope this was a joke. All cars have a 2-phase AC charger on board, and the top portion of this connector will always work with a standard AC J1772 plug. Only some cars (and some very special stations) will have the additional circuitry for DC charging, and those will have the additional pins for the DC charging jack. DC charging is much higher power than AC charging (usually supplied by a capacitor bank), and with today's batteries it actually causes significant wear to charge them that fast. So until we get better batteries, DC fast charging is irrelevant to most consumers. It is a shame that policymakers are so obsessed with fast-charging before either the standards or the batteries are actually ready for prime time--that money could be better spent on more useful AC charging stations and public awareness.
Given that there are only a finite number of cops on the road, and some offenses are difficult to detect let alone stop someone for, I assume that means you are in favor of more automated enforcement? Like red light cameras, don't-block-the-fucking-intersection cameras, insurance company dashboard boxes, etc. There are only two options to improve safety: make driver's licenses more like pilot licences in rigor, or make the cars drive themselves. Nissan just got closet to the latter. Just like Google said, self-driving car technology will be introduced slowly until eventually the cars *can* drive themselves.
If you keep a safe distance and always have an out, then this system will never activate. This is so one of those two distracted people's car will save their dumb asses for them. Then they can go home and continue raising their kids into dumbasses instead of them turning into drug dealers when their parents died.
I think it gave him an "itsyourfault".
No one seems to have mentioned it yet, but it's worth pointing out that Amazon is presumably buying just the OMAP processor *design* unit, not the manufacturing unit. They will likely still use TI's foundries to make the parts, but Amazon will have control over the architecture and who gets the documentation.
Also worth reinforcing that this is not a bad deal for TI. ARM CPUs are pretty much a commodity product at this point, without much room for differentiation unless you go hog wild with optimizations like Qualcomm has. TI's main business has always been in the low-level ASIC and microcontroller markets, where is has a very large, well-respected variety of parts and continues to improve them.
"Simple relay" doesn't begin to describe what is actually necessary to do what he is suggesting. To truly upgrade the Deep Space Network we need something capable of processing terabytes a day from a variety of existing and yet-to-be launched spacecraft. Not only would it need to buffer all this data until a wide-bandwidth path to Earth opens up, scientists would likely offload a great deal of compression and even science processing to the supercomputer on the moon so that we never have to download the raw data at all.
That is the way Earth-orbiting science missions are moving right now--new high-speed, high-resolution detectors generate so much data it is virtually impossible to download it all to Earth at any where near the rate it is produced, so preprocessing and compression are executed in ever-increasing space-based computing resources. This station on the moon is simply the logical progression as applied to deep space missions, since there is less power for big CPUs on smaller craft located farther from the sun.
Somebody already did.
It's a cheap way to do two-factor authentication. You need your password, and you also need your graphics card. If either of them is lost or changes, then you have a much more difficult reidentification process. This system has the same vulnerabilities that any two-factor authentication scheme has, but less than many deployed systems. Many banks already use cookies or something to "register" your computer, and ask you extra questions when you logon from a different machine or clear the cookies. Some send you a text message on your phone as a form of two-factor identification, but that's kinda dumb because phones are easily lost or hacked, and available on the person you just tortured to get his password, so now you have everything.
I guess the point is that to the average person, as long as there isn't a war in the streets, life goes on. It's better to have 100 years of mediocrity than 20 years of brilliance, 5 years of bloodshed, and another 20 years of brilliance.
Thing is, I don't see any way to change the patent system short of the moral equivalent of a violent revolution. If we're going to go that far, why not take it a step further so we don't have to do it again in another 50 or 100 years.
The ideal system of government is a benevolent dictator. One person acting with consistent policy and absolute power putting the interests of the majority above special interests and himself. While it is possible to find such a person once every few centuries, it is impossible to maintain this system of government because a bad dictator will inevitably rise and send everything to hell. Every society in the world has gone through the motions of trying to "fix" their monarchy, and suffered revolution after revolution "fixing" their system trying to find a better single ruler. But now, we have realized it was always a losing battle and abandoned the monarchy altogether. Representative governments may be inefficient and suboptimal, but they are stable for the long term and do not require violent "fixes" periodically.
The argument presented by this article is that patent systems behave in the same way. While a "fixed" patent system would be ideal, its corruption inevitably recurs no matter how many times we actually manage to "fix" it because of how it inherently distributes money and influence among the concerned parties. The only solution, therefore, is to abolish the system entirely and use a completely different paradigm to produce suboptimal but stable results. In many industries that may in fact be laissez-faire, while in others we may need different, more targeted approaches.
This. If drug development were offloaded to socialized nonprofit organizations, they would have less incentive to falsify results or push drugs with minimal improvements as "the next big thing". Plus, maybe we would have less of this ridiculous "Talk to your doctor about Xyanoflexanol. May cause blindness, nuclear holocaust and explosive diarrhea" advertising.
You seem to not have read the part of my post where I mention the subsidies, but your point is valid. We can then take the true cost of the electric car and compare it to the true cost of the gas car. This study found the total costs borne by both consumer and taxpayer for every gallon of gasoline burned to be $15.14 in 2007 (if you don't follow the link, they include medical, environmental, and military costs as well). A 2012 study and a 2011 study both found the total cost of dirty coal-fired electricity to be less than 9 cents per kilowatt hour.
Now take your average new compact gasoline car at 28 mpg, and a Nissan LEAF which gets about 3.6 mi/kWh. To go 1000 miles on gas, you burn 35.7 gallons, which equals $540.71 in total societal costs. Now to go those same 1000 miles in the LEAF, on 277.8 kWh of electricity, it costs society $25. The electric car costs just 4.6% of an equivalent gas car when all these factors are taken into account. Over a 100,000 mile life span, the electric car saves $51,571, more than five times the typical production subsidy. The conclusion, then, is that the taxpayer gets an incredible return on investment for electric vehicle subsidies.
If you can find numbers that contradict mine, please post them. I could not find any concrete facts on sites with opposing biases, so I must assume they have motivations other than scientific accuracy.
Their Tesla-based RAV4 EV is apparently still on track, for what limited sales they were planning for it from the beginning, anyway. I'm guessing the iQ is an internally developed drivetrain that is not as sophisticated, and they decided that they cannot bring the price down enough given what its capabilities are. I'm still hopeful that they'll roll out higher-performance vehicles in the future.
That means that a battery with 600 Wh/kg has the same range per kg as a gasoline drive train.
Forgive me for not running the numbers myself, but does that include the smaller weight of the electric drive components, or does that just compare battery weight vs. gasoline weight? If the latter, then you left out a large advantage that electric drive trains have--reduced mechanical components.
A car that has to lug around 500+ pounds of batteries will never be as efficient as a car with a small gas motor.
Do you have any idea how inefficient internal combustion engines are? The average efficiency is around 15% of chemical energy converted to mechanical. Electric drive trains, on the other hand, can be as much as 80% efficient if you include regenerative braking. That's why the EPA equivalent efficiency ratings are 3x better for electric cars than gas, even with the extra weight. Plus, the batteries they are shipping now are expected to have 8-10 year life spans at *least*, not 5.
Call it politically motivated if you like, but reducing our dependence on global oil prices (even if we don't import any of it) and reducing air pollution in cities seem like pretty noble goals to me.
electric vehicles are still much more expensive than equivalent compact cars.
This is a myth caused by sticker shock. The savings on fuel and maintenance more than make up for the added cost. Edmunds.com shows the 5-year "True Cost to Own" of a 2012 Nissan LEAF is $1000 LESS than that of a 2012 Toyota Corolla, and the LEAF is bigger and much more fun to drive. Admittedly, that includes the $7500 federal tax credit, but that is the calculus we currently have to work with. Cost will come down with time. Like you said, many more people could be happy with an electric car if they would just do the math--and take a test drive! Electric cars are amazing.
The other reason for my assumption was that if they really are pointing a dish at a spot on the surface of Mars from earth, then they will need super-precise dish tracking mechanisms. While on second thought that is entirely within NASA's capabilities, and used all the time on radio telescopes, I initially thought they would avoid that type of design.
Sorry, I'm generally familiar with radio physics but not familiar with the degree to which a radio signal can be collimated. I wasn't sure it was possible with a reasonably-sized antenna to form a beam with that little divergence. At least with lasers, a wider beam will diverge less over the same distance, but I assumed it was relative to the wavelength, so a low-divergence radio beam would have to be even wider. Guess I should go ask my buddies in the RF branch, since they actually work on the DSN.
I know it just looks like pork going to a couple states, but the alternative is what we have with the Joint Strike Fighter--the supply chain is fragmented into all 50 states so nobody wants to kill it, but it raises the overall cost of the program substantially. And science is even harder to fragment than manufacturing--scientists need to be able to work together, and with engineers, regularly to make efficient progress.
Not only that, but the ground software likely wasn't even finished when the rover launched. It's standard practice to spend the eight months of transit testing and refining the rover AI and upload it either in flight or after landing. Heck, they might have even patched the flight software at some point before it got near the planet.
Yeah, especially if you include the other three rovers we already sent there. The good stuff for Curiosity is yet to come!
Where to point it? That's easy...at the red spot in the sky. No signal from Earth will be collimated enough that it matters *where* on Mars you point it.
It takes longer if the "maintenance" is installing a censorship filter to week out politically inconvenient petitions before they hit the front page.
You'd think at some point they'd get tired of asking us...
They would, if they could remember the &#@* answer for more than 10 seconds.
You apparently haven't spent much time in Washington DC during the summer. We were among the first adopters of air conditioning because summer is so insufferably hot and humid here. Before AC, the federal government had more "heat days" than snow days, and it was common for people to sleep in bathtubs full of cold water. When the power goes out in the summer in DC, people die from heat-related illnesses with alarming regularity. Most people also are not used to stockpiling non-perishable food, and businesses and public services are out of power in addition to homes, so life can get pretty difficult. Heck, my house has power but no Internet because the Verizon tech can't re-enable it until the central office gets turned back on. So yeah, losing power for a week in an entire region is about a lot more than camping in the basement in a snowstorm.