He wrote 17 number one selling books and had three of his books turned into blockbuster movies.
More than 3 books became movies. Off the top of my head, Hunt for Red October, Sum of All Fears, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, Red Storm Rising. Would not be surprised to see several more of his works become movies at some point.
Of course you can go elsewhere. You can go to your home improvement store and buy insulation and LED bulbs, thereby reducing your consumption.
First off that isn't "going elsewhere". Second off, I've already done that. My house is actually pretty energy efficient. This in no way solves the problem of having a monopoly provider of energy.
You could put solar panels on your rooftop and net meter, thereby bringing your consumption to zero.
So I'm supposed to spend $20,000 (yes I've priced it) to eliminate a $200/month electric bill? That's 8+ years before breakeven at best and I can't be sure I'll live at my current house that long. Furthermore it doesn't take me off the grid. It merely makes me a net zero user. Sometimes I'll still need to tap into the power grid.
You can use oil or gas to heat instead of electric, and you can use gas to cook instead of electric.
I do use gas but where I live the gas utility and the electric utility are the same company. I cannot turn gas into electricity cheaper than the electric company can.
Hell, you could get really feisty like Boulder, CO and try to become a municipal utility, removing your entire city or town from the utility's territory.
Terrific. I trade one monopoly for a different monopoly.
In most or all of CA, TX, ND, SD, MN, WI, IA, IL, IN, MO, MI, OH, PA, NJ, MD, DE, and WV, to be joined by NE, KS, and OK in Mar 2014, the power plants are dispatched by merit. That means only the lowest cost generating stations operate, so they all fight to lower costs, and hence bids, to make sure they get to produce electricity for us and money for themselves.
I live in one of those states and I assure you that NONE of the savings get passed along to me as the consumer. In most places in my state there is one option for gas and one option for electricity. Occasionally the two big power companies compete but not in many places. It doesn't matter at all to me what it costs them to generate the power if I don't get to share in any of the savings. My electric rates don't change just because the cost of natural gas is relatively low at the moment. The only way I would see the benefits would be if I had more than one company with a power line connected to my house. But if that were the case then the cost of distribution would be higher because power utilities tend to me natural monopolies.
the development of a novel strategy for microbial gasoline production through metabolic engineering of E. coli."
Isn't the problem the fact that we are burning gasoline and other petroleum products? Using bugs to create more fossil fuels is hardly more ecologically sound than pumping out the hydro-carbons produced millions of years ago by different creatures. Same action just time shifted. We're still eventually pumping a bunch of carbon and other problem gases into the atmosphere which is what is causing all the problems at the end of the day. At best it mitigates some geo-political tensions but does nothing to solve the problem that fossil fuels are bad for the environment.
Mothballing a nuclear plant shouldn't be an issue at all, many plants have stayed offline for a year or more due to regulatory problems, if they can be kept offline for one year I can't see why they can't be kept offline for 5
There are a lot of costs with keeping them offline. Personnel, servicing, inspections, security, and lots of other high fixed costs that don't go away just because the plant is not producing electricity. For a relatively short time it might make sense to bear these costs but for periods of more than 1-2 years the economics start to look really bad. Nuke plants have huge operating expenses and they generate not a dime of profit unless they are producing electricity. Would you shut down your business for 5 years while still paying a lot of money in the uncertain hope that it might be profitable someday?
Virtually every nuke plant is unique and there is a LOT of institutional knowledge that goes into operating each one. Shut down for several years and a lot of those people are going to move on to other things. Do you really want to keep paying staff for 5 years for them to do essentially nothing even if they are willing? Hard to justify doing that to company shareholders.
Am I alone in wondering why the cost to the consumer remains the same?
Power utilities are regulated and the prices they charge to consumers are typically regulated as well. Since in most areas they are a monopoly you should expect them to charge the highest amount permitted by the local regulating body and not a penny less. Not like you can go anywhere else. Where I live I have precisely one option for electricity and one option for natural gas. The power company knows this and behaves accordingly. Even in areas where there is more than one option they basically are an oligopoly which isn't much different from a pricing standpoint. They all know there is little incentive to compete.
So what happens when a nuclear plant runs into financial difficulty?
It gets decommissioned. Still expensive but less expensive than operating at a significant loss over time. Nuke plants aren't like gas or coal plants where they can be mothballed and then restarted later easily. (I'm sure it's technically possible but apparently very problematic)
If energy is cheap and plentiful, things like clean water and fuel are a lot easier to make.
Depends on how clean the energy source is.
Arable land is also less of a problem when cheap energy can be used to make fertilizer.
Arable land is less of a problem though there is a finite amount of it and not all of it can be used no matter how much energy you have. Access to fresh water remains a problem which is somewhat alleviated by energy availability. Excess use of fertilizers are a problem all their own. Petroleum based fertilizers (which most are) are a serious pollutant and no amount of cheap energy will make them less of one. Like fossil fuels used to power equipment they have a big upside but at a serious environmental cost.
In any case the point is that we fight over MUCH sillier things than the very real concerns of scarce energy resource.
Nonsense. People simply aren't that evolved. If we aren't fighting about energy we'll fight about something even more absurd like skin color or which imaginary invisible man in the sky we should all believe in.
Eventually it won't require any specific material.
So you think alchemy will actually work and you'll be able to economically transmute one element into another? Little unclear how you think no specific material will be required.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_Peace - check out the nanoforge.
Just because it is a neat idea in a science fiction book doesn't mean it is actually going to happen.
3D printing has a long ways to go before it upsets traditional manufacturing.
For large scale production you are correct for the forseeable future. 3D printing is not fast or economical for bulk manufacturing - there are other techniques available that make more sense. However for some forms of small quantity production however, its impact is already being felt. Cases where setting up tooling is prohibitively expensive and/or slow. Prototype shops already make heavy use of 3D printers and have for over 10 years now. I was using a Stratasys machine 13 years ago. Tool and die shops, job shops doing small production runs, castings and some others are going to be the next heavy users of 3D printers and many already have them. 3D printing is great for creating fixtures, test parts, mold blanks, prototypes, sales models and more. It's going to be an important tool in the coming decade and beyond.
But the exclusive parts... they stop short of asking for your first born.
Of course that's true of other industries too. Gross margins on software are usually around 70-80% and net margins are often in the 20-30% range. (compare with around 30% and maybe 10% respectively in manufacturing) When you buy software only about 10-15% of the cost is actual engineering and production costs are trivial. 60%+ of the cost is usually how much they spend trying to market and sell it to you plus executive salaries etc. As big a rip off as car dealers can be I'd say software companies are usually worse.
saw by accident the price list on a computer dealer : front pipe exhaust nuts : 11$ a piece and they buy them for ~5$ from the factory.
A components distributor I deal with told me about a wire harness he saw a Buick dealer selling to some kindly older gentleman for around $220. This wire harness was composed of parts that he sells all the time so he knew exactly what it cost to make. Even counting a distributor markup (around 50% over production price) there was *maybe* $10 worth of materials in the part (probably less) and at most $5-10 worth of labor. Dealer markups are obscene in most cases.
So you're saying you've passed off fake stuff as geniune? Lets just say I don't want my brake rotor to only 'look' real...
No, I'm saying it would be trivial to do so. We used to make "parts" for booths at auto shows from laminated paper and plastic (using Stratasys machines) that once painted you simply could not distinguish from the real thing without close examination.
Fake parts happen all the time and many of them are very dangerous. Some however you'd have a very hard time telling from the real thing. Ubiquitous 3D printing is not going to make this less of an issue.
At home? In your family room? I wouldn't recommend that... Yes there are printers that can do that stuff, but you simply aren't going to have them be usable by the average person in their home.
I wouldn't place a large wager on that if I were you. Isn't going to happen tomorrow but I would be more surprised if we did NOT see 3D printing of metals and other materials in (some) homes within the next 10-20 years.
Because it would be outrageously expensive to do so even if you don't count the inevitable legal costs. I fully expect someone to do this to some degree but doing it for all the parts in a car has more of an economic hurdle than a technical one.
My car has little plastic thingies which spray water on the headlights. Due to snow and ice, they are broken. Replacement parts at the dealer cost $110 each (for a part which can't contain more than $1 worth of plastic). I'd love to download and print replacements.
I run a company that makes wire harnesses. We recently quoted a harness for a major car company (can't say the name) which we would sell to a Tier 1 auto for about $11 and would cost us about $8 to make. If you were to buy this from a dealer they would charge you about $80. As a crude rule of thumb, the mark up on aftermarket dealer parts is typically about 5-8X over the price charged by the maker of that part. So if you were being charged $110, chances are that the company that made it charged somewhere around $13-20. For low volume plastic parts that's probably pretty reasonable given the amount of labor and the tooling costs in a typical low volume plastic part. A die for plastic parts might cost $5-10,000 easy. I'm not counting the paint, material handling, overhead, raw materials, etc. That means you have to produce many thousands of parts just to break even on the tooling. 3D printing *might* make a dent in the price of some of these low volume parts because you don't have a lot of the tooling costs but you will still have a LOT of machining costs. A 3D printed part might take 10-20 hours to complete and that isn't cheap even if you own the machine.
If it became cheaper to build a car, then i would expect the prices of ready-built cars to drop accordingly.
It will almost certainly never be cheaper to print your own than to buy one made by Ford or Toyota. The materials alone would cost more than the car in the quantities you could buy them in. Volume discounts when you are talking millions of units a year are enormous. The per-unit production cost to a big auto company for a comparable vehicle is going to be far, far lower than any one off, even if there is no profit motive attached. (Disclosure: I am an accountant)
Unless you are talking about luxury cars, they aren't priced "artificially high". Even the most profitable auto makers (Porsche, Toyota, etc) only have profit margins in the high single digits. They make money by selling a LOT of vehicles but they don't generally make all that much on each one. A few luxury makes make a lot of money per vehicle (Ferrari, etc) but they don't and can't sell all that many at the price points they charge.
Nobody is going to have the ability to print out an actual car.
Not necessarily true. Some parts might not be printable but many/most will. I used to work in a rapid prototyping shop. We could make replica parts (in plastic) that once painted you'd have a hard time telling they weren't the real thing just from looking at them.
Printers simply aren't going to be user quality and printing in materials like steel or carbon fiber.
Actually you can print metal. There are devices out there that can print aluminum, titanium, and steel. Hell you can even print organic tissue. It's not just plastic.
Exactly. I'm sure it was a joke but it might very well have been ha-ha-only-serious. The topic itself is no laughing matter but it sounds like he handled the question appropriately.
Torvalds said no while nodding his head yes is a JOKE people, not a fucking admission.
I agree it is a joke but making a joke does not mean there is nothing serious being communicated. The best jokes are usually about topics that are very serious. Maybe it was a joke and nothing more (I certainly hope so) but without more information you cannot actually be certain either way. If he was asked to put a back door in that would hardly be a surprising revelation.
Please, save the tinfoil paranoia for Reddit, and keep the serious tech discussions here.
You think the idea of a backdoor in linux is not a serious tech topic? Besides it's only paranoia if "they" are not actually after you. Recent revelations about the NSA and other government activities clearly demonstrates that being concerned over government snooping is actually quite reasonable.
It was supposed to be just a series hybrid. But the engine is directly coupled to the wheels at some points, and it's coupled through one of the electric motors at others.
Granted, the drivetrain is a little more complicated than simply electric motor drives wheels and gas motor charges electric motors. My guess is that they ran into some corner cases that made a true series hybrid impractical so some engineering compromises were made based on the technology available at the time. I know they weren't able to use the engine they originally hoped (a 3 cylinder engine instead of the 4 they ended up with) and I'm sure there were other tradeoffs that were necessary.
Unfortunately, most of the appeal of a series hybrid is elimination of the drivetrain.
The appeal is efficiency. If it happens to occur by removal of the drivetrain then so be it. The only people that really care about the actual mechanism are engineering geeks like you and me. Remember the old saw that people buy solutions not products. What people want is better fuel economy per horsepower. How that occurs is not of first order importance.
What I would like to see is a series hybrid with a diesel - very similar to locomotives. I think that would make a huge amount of sense for large trucks (semis etc) and probably for a lot of passenger cars too. Even if there is no battery only propulsion it should have efficiency and performance gains.
People are buying Leafs, so I'm seriously surprised there's no Volt EV.
There probably will be an electric Volt at some point - I'm just not sure when. The Leaf is a VERY different car aimed at a very different market. A Volt can be your one and only car. For most people a Leaf is a second vehicle or they live in an area with very good public transit. Where I live I could not seriously consider a Leaf as primary transportation. Other than the relatively short range it is a pretty good vehicle but by design it cannot appeal to as wide an audience as the Volt.
Wild promises of building an EV and not a hybrid, and then wild promises of a revolutionary drivetrain which never appeared?
What drive train do you think they promised? I'm not aware of any similar drive train from their major competitors. The Volt uses the gas engine to power the electric motors which actually drive the car - kind of like a diesel locomotive. The hybrid offerings from Honda, Ford and Toyota work differently. They can drive the car straight off the gas motor which is quite different. The Volt has the best all electric range among similar hybrid cars (around 40 miles) and I'm not aware of any cars near production that can match that. The Volt could be turned into an EV rather easily since removing the engine would provide lots of room for batteries. The economics of it just don't make much sense yet.
I'm not saying the volt isn't a perfectly fine automobile, I've never driven one, so how would I know?
I have driven one and can confirm they are nice. You can tell the money went into the drivetrain instead of the interior (not super plush) but it drives very nicely.
GM has one advantage though. In some states, Tesla is forbidden to sell cars because they are not going through dealers. Plus, GM also has a lot larger advertising warchest.
GM has a lot more advantages than that. GM has a much larger R&D budget. GM has a global distribution network. GM has lobbyists. GM has economies of scale for production and purchasing. GM has a well known brand.
Disadvantages? Big company inertia, difficulty funding speculative projects that are likely to lose money for years, management distracted by a wider product line, internal politics, shareholders demands for immediate profits.
first one of them that get a performance electric car, that isn't fugly as all the current "green" cars....sporty looking (like the Tesla Roadster was) for the price range of a low end Vette...gets all my money.
The Tesla Model S seems to fit your critera. It's very nice looking, does 0-60 in just over 4 seconds in the fastest model and under 6 seconds in the slowest, it costs roughly the same as a well appointed current model Corvette, and it got the highest road test score from Consumer Reports they've ever given.
Only if you have an absurdly narrow view of what is actually occurring. Many of these are nuisance lawsuits brought by people who cannot possibly be injured by infringement of a patent because they do nothing with the patent except extract money from others via legal threats. Someone who purchases a patent solely for the purpose of extracting legal settlements IS engaging in a form of racketeering. The legal system merely has not caught up to what is actually occuring.
They own the patents in question, and if there's any reasonable argument that the defendant infringes, even if you have to make a bunch of factual assumptions in favor of the plaintiff (those factual assumptions would be resolved at trial by the jury), then the suit isn't groundless.
In many cases there is no reasonable argument that the "defendant" infringes because the patent should never have been granted in the first place. The mere fact that they own a particular patent is insufficient. There has to be a reasonable argument that somehow the defendant might possibly infringe on said patent. Additionally you do not get to make endless assumptions in favor of the plaintiff otherwise no suit could ever be considered groundless. In some cases the patent trolls have legitimate cases. Often they do not and you can be damn sure they know (or should know) the difference. The legal system is not supposed to be a source of profit. It is supposed to resolve genuine disputes over material issues.
Offering to settle a suit that's not groundless is not extortion.
And many of these suits ARE groundless. Furthermore there is usually no lawsuit, merely the threat of one regardless of the merits of the argument. If you pay up because you cannot fight even though you believe you would certainly win then that without question is extortion. There are numerous patents out there that would have no reasonable chance of withstanding judicial review.
That is VERY debatable. In many cases they arguably are committing one or more of: extortion, barratry and/or racketeering. In many/most cases they are simply creating nuisance lawsuits in the hopes of coercing a settlement without any actual time in court. What they are doing is functionally the equivalent of some thug going into a retail store and saying "nice store - shame if anything bad would happen to it". Technically saying that is legal but in reality they are committing a crime. Patent trolls are really no different.
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He wrote 17 number one selling books and had three of his books turned into blockbuster movies.
More than 3 books became movies. Off the top of my head, Hunt for Red October, Sum of All Fears, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, Red Storm Rising. Would not be surprised to see several more of his works become movies at some point.
Of course you can go elsewhere. You can go to your home improvement store and buy insulation and LED bulbs, thereby reducing your consumption.
First off that isn't "going elsewhere". Second off, I've already done that. My house is actually pretty energy efficient. This in no way solves the problem of having a monopoly provider of energy.
You could put solar panels on your rooftop and net meter, thereby bringing your consumption to zero.
So I'm supposed to spend $20,000 (yes I've priced it) to eliminate a $200/month electric bill? That's 8+ years before breakeven at best and I can't be sure I'll live at my current house that long. Furthermore it doesn't take me off the grid. It merely makes me a net zero user. Sometimes I'll still need to tap into the power grid.
You can use oil or gas to heat instead of electric, and you can use gas to cook instead of electric.
I do use gas but where I live the gas utility and the electric utility are the same company. I cannot turn gas into electricity cheaper than the electric company can.
Hell, you could get really feisty like Boulder, CO and try to become a municipal utility, removing your entire city or town from the utility's territory.
Terrific. I trade one monopoly for a different monopoly.
In most or all of CA, TX, ND, SD, MN, WI, IA, IL, IN, MO, MI, OH, PA, NJ, MD, DE, and WV, to be joined by NE, KS, and OK in Mar 2014, the power plants are dispatched by merit. That means only the lowest cost generating stations operate, so they all fight to lower costs, and hence bids, to make sure they get to produce electricity for us and money for themselves.
I live in one of those states and I assure you that NONE of the savings get passed along to me as the consumer. In most places in my state there is one option for gas and one option for electricity. Occasionally the two big power companies compete but not in many places. It doesn't matter at all to me what it costs them to generate the power if I don't get to share in any of the savings. My electric rates don't change just because the cost of natural gas is relatively low at the moment. The only way I would see the benefits would be if I had more than one company with a power line connected to my house. But if that were the case then the cost of distribution would be higher because power utilities tend to me natural monopolies.
the development of a novel strategy for microbial gasoline production through metabolic engineering of E. coli."
Isn't the problem the fact that we are burning gasoline and other petroleum products? Using bugs to create more fossil fuels is hardly more ecologically sound than pumping out the hydro-carbons produced millions of years ago by different creatures. Same action just time shifted. We're still eventually pumping a bunch of carbon and other problem gases into the atmosphere which is what is causing all the problems at the end of the day. At best it mitigates some geo-political tensions but does nothing to solve the problem that fossil fuels are bad for the environment.
Mothballing a nuclear plant shouldn't be an issue at all, many plants have stayed offline for a year or more due to regulatory problems, if they can be kept offline for one year I can't see why they can't be kept offline for 5
There are a lot of costs with keeping them offline. Personnel, servicing, inspections, security, and lots of other high fixed costs that don't go away just because the plant is not producing electricity. For a relatively short time it might make sense to bear these costs but for periods of more than 1-2 years the economics start to look really bad. Nuke plants have huge operating expenses and they generate not a dime of profit unless they are producing electricity. Would you shut down your business for 5 years while still paying a lot of money in the uncertain hope that it might be profitable someday?
Virtually every nuke plant is unique and there is a LOT of institutional knowledge that goes into operating each one. Shut down for several years and a lot of those people are going to move on to other things. Do you really want to keep paying staff for 5 years for them to do essentially nothing even if they are willing? Hard to justify doing that to company shareholders.
Am I alone in wondering why the cost to the consumer remains the same?
Power utilities are regulated and the prices they charge to consumers are typically regulated as well. Since in most areas they are a monopoly you should expect them to charge the highest amount permitted by the local regulating body and not a penny less. Not like you can go anywhere else. Where I live I have precisely one option for electricity and one option for natural gas. The power company knows this and behaves accordingly. Even in areas where there is more than one option they basically are an oligopoly which isn't much different from a pricing standpoint. They all know there is little incentive to compete.
So what happens when a nuclear plant runs into financial difficulty?
It gets decommissioned. Still expensive but less expensive than operating at a significant loss over time. Nuke plants aren't like gas or coal plants where they can be mothballed and then restarted later easily. (I'm sure it's technically possible but apparently very problematic)
If energy is cheap and plentiful, things like clean water and fuel are a lot easier to make.
Depends on how clean the energy source is.
Arable land is also less of a problem when cheap energy can be used to make fertilizer.
Arable land is less of a problem though there is a finite amount of it and not all of it can be used no matter how much energy you have. Access to fresh water remains a problem which is somewhat alleviated by energy availability. Excess use of fertilizers are a problem all their own. Petroleum based fertilizers (which most are) are a serious pollutant and no amount of cheap energy will make them less of one. Like fossil fuels used to power equipment they have a big upside but at a serious environmental cost.
In any case the point is that we fight over MUCH sillier things than the very real concerns of scarce energy resource.
The reactor would have ended war.
Nonsense. People simply aren't that evolved. If we aren't fighting about energy we'll fight about something even more absurd like skin color or which imaginary invisible man in the sky we should all believe in.
Eventually it won't require any specific material.
So you think alchemy will actually work and you'll be able to economically transmute one element into another? Little unclear how you think no specific material will be required.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_Peace - check out the nanoforge.
Just because it is a neat idea in a science fiction book doesn't mean it is actually going to happen.
3D printing has a long ways to go before it upsets traditional manufacturing.
For large scale production you are correct for the forseeable future. 3D printing is not fast or economical for bulk manufacturing - there are other techniques available that make more sense. However for some forms of small quantity production however, its impact is already being felt. Cases where setting up tooling is prohibitively expensive and/or slow. Prototype shops already make heavy use of 3D printers and have for over 10 years now. I was using a Stratasys machine 13 years ago. Tool and die shops, job shops doing small production runs, castings and some others are going to be the next heavy users of 3D printers and many already have them. 3D printing is great for creating fixtures, test parts, mold blanks, prototypes, sales models and more. It's going to be an important tool in the coming decade and beyond.
But the exclusive parts ... they stop short of asking for your first born.
Of course that's true of other industries too. Gross margins on software are usually around 70-80% and net margins are often in the 20-30% range. (compare with around 30% and maybe 10% respectively in manufacturing) When you buy software only about 10-15% of the cost is actual engineering and production costs are trivial. 60%+ of the cost is usually how much they spend trying to market and sell it to you plus executive salaries etc. As big a rip off as car dealers can be I'd say software companies are usually worse.
saw by accident the price list on a computer dealer : front pipe exhaust nuts : 11$ a piece and they buy them for ~5$ from the factory.
A components distributor I deal with told me about a wire harness he saw a Buick dealer selling to some kindly older gentleman for around $220. This wire harness was composed of parts that he sells all the time so he knew exactly what it cost to make. Even counting a distributor markup (around 50% over production price) there was *maybe* $10 worth of materials in the part (probably less) and at most $5-10 worth of labor. Dealer markups are obscene in most cases.
So you're saying you've passed off fake stuff as geniune? Lets just say I don't want my brake rotor to only 'look' real...
No, I'm saying it would be trivial to do so. We used to make "parts" for booths at auto shows from laminated paper and plastic (using Stratasys machines) that once painted you simply could not distinguish from the real thing without close examination.
Fake parts happen all the time and many of them are very dangerous. Some however you'd have a very hard time telling from the real thing. Ubiquitous 3D printing is not going to make this less of an issue.
At home? In your family room? I wouldn't recommend that... Yes there are printers that can do that stuff, but you simply aren't going to have them be usable by the average person in their home.
I wouldn't place a large wager on that if I were you. Isn't going to happen tomorrow but I would be more surprised if we did NOT see 3D printing of metals and other materials in (some) homes within the next 10-20 years.
So why not by taking the entire car apart.
Because it would be outrageously expensive to do so even if you don't count the inevitable legal costs. I fully expect someone to do this to some degree but doing it for all the parts in a car has more of an economic hurdle than a technical one.
My car has little plastic thingies which spray water on the headlights. Due to snow and ice, they are broken. Replacement parts at the dealer cost $110 each (for a part which can't contain more than $1 worth of plastic).
I'd love to download and print replacements.
I run a company that makes wire harnesses. We recently quoted a harness for a major car company (can't say the name) which we would sell to a Tier 1 auto for about $11 and would cost us about $8 to make. If you were to buy this from a dealer they would charge you about $80. As a crude rule of thumb, the mark up on aftermarket dealer parts is typically about 5-8X over the price charged by the maker of that part. So if you were being charged $110, chances are that the company that made it charged somewhere around $13-20. For low volume plastic parts that's probably pretty reasonable given the amount of labor and the tooling costs in a typical low volume plastic part. A die for plastic parts might cost $5-10,000 easy. I'm not counting the paint, material handling, overhead, raw materials, etc. That means you have to produce many thousands of parts just to break even on the tooling. 3D printing *might* make a dent in the price of some of these low volume parts because you don't have a lot of the tooling costs but you will still have a LOT of machining costs. A 3D printed part might take 10-20 hours to complete and that isn't cheap even if you own the machine.
If it became cheaper to build a car, then i would expect the prices of ready-built cars to drop accordingly.
It will almost certainly never be cheaper to print your own than to buy one made by Ford or Toyota. The materials alone would cost more than the car in the quantities you could buy them in. Volume discounts when you are talking millions of units a year are enormous. The per-unit production cost to a big auto company for a comparable vehicle is going to be far, far lower than any one off, even if there is no profit motive attached. (Disclosure: I am an accountant)
Unless you are talking about luxury cars, they aren't priced "artificially high". Even the most profitable auto makers (Porsche, Toyota, etc) only have profit margins in the high single digits. They make money by selling a LOT of vehicles but they don't generally make all that much on each one. A few luxury makes make a lot of money per vehicle (Ferrari, etc) but they don't and can't sell all that many at the price points they charge.
Nobody is going to have the ability to print out an actual car.
Not necessarily true. Some parts might not be printable but many/most will. I used to work in a rapid prototyping shop. We could make replica parts (in plastic) that once painted you'd have a hard time telling they weren't the real thing just from looking at them.
Printers simply aren't going to be user quality and printing in materials like steel or carbon fiber.
Actually you can print metal. There are devices out there that can print aluminum, titanium, and steel. Hell you can even print organic tissue. It's not just plastic.
Was it a joke or was it a nod and wink?
Exactly. I'm sure it was a joke but it might very well have been ha-ha-only-serious. The topic itself is no laughing matter but it sounds like he handled the question appropriately.
Torvalds said no while nodding his head yes is a JOKE people, not a fucking admission.
I agree it is a joke but making a joke does not mean there is nothing serious being communicated. The best jokes are usually about topics that are very serious. Maybe it was a joke and nothing more (I certainly hope so) but without more information you cannot actually be certain either way. If he was asked to put a back door in that would hardly be a surprising revelation.
Please, save the tinfoil paranoia for Reddit, and keep the serious tech discussions here.
You think the idea of a backdoor in linux is not a serious tech topic? Besides it's only paranoia if "they" are not actually after you. Recent revelations about the NSA and other government activities clearly demonstrates that being concerned over government snooping is actually quite reasonable.
Too many seats....looks like a family car.
It really doesn't. I've sat in one. "Family" is about the last word I'd use to describe how it looks.
I want a 2-seat sports car.
Nothing wrong with that but you are ignoring a lot of really good cars by insisting on only two seats.
It was supposed to be just a series hybrid. But the engine is directly coupled to the wheels at some points, and it's coupled through one of the electric motors at others.
Granted, the drivetrain is a little more complicated than simply electric motor drives wheels and gas motor charges electric motors. My guess is that they ran into some corner cases that made a true series hybrid impractical so some engineering compromises were made based on the technology available at the time. I know they weren't able to use the engine they originally hoped (a 3 cylinder engine instead of the 4 they ended up with) and I'm sure there were other tradeoffs that were necessary.
Unfortunately, most of the appeal of a series hybrid is elimination of the drivetrain.
The appeal is efficiency. If it happens to occur by removal of the drivetrain then so be it. The only people that really care about the actual mechanism are engineering geeks like you and me. Remember the old saw that people buy solutions not products. What people want is better fuel economy per horsepower. How that occurs is not of first order importance.
What I would like to see is a series hybrid with a diesel - very similar to locomotives. I think that would make a huge amount of sense for large trucks (semis etc) and probably for a lot of passenger cars too. Even if there is no battery only propulsion it should have efficiency and performance gains.
People are buying Leafs, so I'm seriously surprised there's no Volt EV.
There probably will be an electric Volt at some point - I'm just not sure when. The Leaf is a VERY different car aimed at a very different market. A Volt can be your one and only car. For most people a Leaf is a second vehicle or they live in an area with very good public transit. Where I live I could not seriously consider a Leaf as primary transportation. Other than the relatively short range it is a pretty good vehicle but by design it cannot appeal to as wide an audience as the Volt.
Wild promises of building an EV and not a hybrid, and then wild promises of a revolutionary drivetrain which never appeared?
What drive train do you think they promised? I'm not aware of any similar drive train from their major competitors. The Volt uses the gas engine to power the electric motors which actually drive the car - kind of like a diesel locomotive. The hybrid offerings from Honda, Ford and Toyota work differently. They can drive the car straight off the gas motor which is quite different. The Volt has the best all electric range among similar hybrid cars (around 40 miles) and I'm not aware of any cars near production that can match that. The Volt could be turned into an EV rather easily since removing the engine would provide lots of room for batteries. The economics of it just don't make much sense yet.
I'm not saying the volt isn't a perfectly fine automobile, I've never driven one, so how would I know?
I have driven one and can confirm they are nice. You can tell the money went into the drivetrain instead of the interior (not super plush) but it drives very nicely.
GM has one advantage though. In some states, Tesla is forbidden to sell cars because they are not going through dealers. Plus, GM also has a lot larger advertising warchest.
GM has a lot more advantages than that. GM has a much larger R&D budget. GM has a global distribution network. GM has lobbyists. GM has economies of scale for production and purchasing. GM has a well known brand.
Disadvantages? Big company inertia, difficulty funding speculative projects that are likely to lose money for years, management distracted by a wider product line, internal politics, shareholders demands for immediate profits.
first one of them that get a performance electric car, that isn't fugly as all the current "green" cars....sporty looking (like the Tesla Roadster was) for the price range of a low end Vette...gets all my money.
The Tesla Model S seems to fit your critera. It's very nice looking, does 0-60 in just over 4 seconds in the fastest model and under 6 seconds in the slowest, it costs roughly the same as a well appointed current model Corvette, and it got the highest road test score from Consumer Reports they've ever given.
No, none of the above apply.
Only if you have an absurdly narrow view of what is actually occurring. Many of these are nuisance lawsuits brought by people who cannot possibly be injured by infringement of a patent because they do nothing with the patent except extract money from others via legal threats. Someone who purchases a patent solely for the purpose of extracting legal settlements IS engaging in a form of racketeering. The legal system merely has not caught up to what is actually occuring.
They own the patents in question, and if there's any reasonable argument that the defendant infringes, even if you have to make a bunch of factual assumptions in favor of the plaintiff (those factual assumptions would be resolved at trial by the jury), then the suit isn't groundless.
In many cases there is no reasonable argument that the "defendant" infringes because the patent should never have been granted in the first place. The mere fact that they own a particular patent is insufficient. There has to be a reasonable argument that somehow the defendant might possibly infringe on said patent. Additionally you do not get to make endless assumptions in favor of the plaintiff otherwise no suit could ever be considered groundless. In some cases the patent trolls have legitimate cases. Often they do not and you can be damn sure they know (or should know) the difference. The legal system is not supposed to be a source of profit. It is supposed to resolve genuine disputes over material issues.
Offering to settle a suit that's not groundless is not extortion.
And many of these suits ARE groundless. Furthermore there is usually no lawsuit, merely the threat of one regardless of the merits of the argument. If you pay up because you cannot fight even though you believe you would certainly win then that without question is extortion. There are numerous patents out there that would have no reasonable chance of withstanding judicial review.
Except patent trolls aren't actually committing crimes, and therefore aren't criminal.
That is VERY debatable. In many cases they arguably are committing one or more of: extortion, barratry and/or racketeering. In many/most cases they are simply creating nuisance lawsuits in the hopes of coercing a settlement without any actual time in court. What they are doing is functionally the equivalent of some thug going into a retail store and saying "nice store - shame if anything bad would happen to it". Technically saying that is legal but in reality they are committing a crime. Patent trolls are really no different.