There is an Outer Space Treaty that prohibits "weapons of mass destruction" in space. So, no nukes. However, kinetic bombardment weapons have been in development for some time now.
A powerful enough kinetic bombardment system IS a WMD. Just because nukes, biological, and chemical weapons are currently considered WMDs doesn't mean we can't add to the list. When you can get nuclear level yields by dropping an asteroid on a city you'll have a pretty hard time arguing that it isn't a WMD.
The ultimate space weapon could be deployed from the moon.
What weapon? Why would you need the moon to deploy it? One can deploy hugely destructive civilization ending weapons from near earth orbit without needing to go to the trouble of going to the moon.
Whomever has control of the moon(as in..actually there), will control the Earth provided the human race survives that long.
That sentence doesn't make much sense. How exactly do you figure someone on the moon (a place with no food, little water, no atmosphere, and no economy) is going to control earth? By threatening with WMDs? We already have that situation in case you forgot. Do you think people on Earth couldn't shoot those on the moon just as easily as the reverse? I think you've been reading too much science fiction.
They will answer that flying is not a public right nor service; they are private airlines.
Flying is not a public right but the right to travel is and the TSA is most certainly a public service since it is a part of the federal government. Furthermore the airlines fall under the jurisdiction of the FAA as well as various transit authorities so if the airlines don't want to treat passengers nicely we can always revoke their right to use the runways which are routinely taxpayer funded.
And you can fly on other private airlines (like JetSuite X or Surf Air) where you do not have TSA checks.
So only rich people get to enjoy their civil rights?
If you voluntarily agree to a search, then it can't be a 4th amendment violation.
Since freedom of travel is a civil right and air travel is the only realistic option for travel in many cases, it's pretty hard to argue that the search is in any way voluntary.
The TSA is the biggest federal employment program ever.
Incorrect. Currently that would be our grossly oversized and over funded military which employs well over a million people directly and quite a few more indirectly. The TSA is a rounding error by comparison. And irritating boil of a rounding error but small potatoes in the grand scheme of government waste.
'TSA cannot confirm or deny the results of internal tests and condemns the release of any information that could compromise our nation's security."
I'll see their ass covering and raise them that "I condemn failing to release any information that will result in ineffective national security and consider hiding such information to be tantamount to providing aid and comfort to our enemies".
Calling it the 'largest battery' is a bit of a misnomer. It more appropriately would be called the largest group of batteries.
You are confusing the terms battery with cell. All batteries consist of one or more cells. So the word battery is the correct one regardless of size. A large array of connected batteries is still a battery.
Why "from the US"? The cells are made in the far east, and the technology around them provided by the French company.
From the US because that's where Musk's company builds stuff. Where the components come from is a separate issue.
It seems inefficient if they were to ship the cells from China/Japan to the US first, and that the short delivery time is precisely due to Australia being much closer.
You are assuming they aren't carrying any inventory of the battery cells and other electronics in question. In reality they probably have substantial stocks so it's not as if they are ordering everything from scratch. That's the beauty of building multiple products using standard components.
But anyhow, isn't this olds? Unless my old brain suffers from Deja Vu again, wasn't this news many months ago?
Musk made the 100 day offer months ago. Now it appears they have taken him up on the bet. Hence it is now newsworthy.
QVC has actually done a lot to keep up technologically. They make a good deal of revenue from purchases made by people watching their streams via their apps on mobile, Roku, AppleTV, Facebook, and their website.
And yet the average age of their shoppers is still quite old and nearly all of their customer (95%) are repeat customers. So that implies that they are capturing the more technologically savvy of the customers they already had. Even my 98 year old grand mother has an iPad. It's easy enough to advertise an app to facilitate purchases so QVC realizing a lot of revenue though app purchases doesn't actually surprise me much.. They're just making it easier for their existing customer to do business with them which is smart. I'm not being critical of anyone - if QVC has an audience and they make their customers happy then good for them. I don't get the appeal of shopping that way but lots of people do weird shit I don't fully comprehend.
I'm willing to lay odds that QVC doesn't move a heck of a lot of product through Roku purchases though...
Somehow Home Shopping Network is worth 2 billion dollars even with Amazon in the arena. I imagine people throwing money at the screen when any commercial airs; somebody must be buying. I can't understand why.
Inertia and habits play a large part in it. The average age of a QVC shopper is 53 and 95% of their sales come from repeat shoppers. So we're mostly talking about older people who got discovered QVC before the internet was a thing continue to shop with them because its an old habit they are comfortable with. It seems unlikely that younger shoppers will come on board so the days of QVC are likely numbered but not for a few decades more.
The accountants make the rules, and everybody knows it.
Speaking as an actual accountant I can assure you this is not actually true. Accountants can facilitate getting around the rules or in pointing out where the rules have nasty sharp teeth best avoided but they rarely have much say in what the actual rules are. Accountants aren't the ones robbing the mythical bank - they are the ones that provide the floor plans and sometimes drive the getaway car. The ones holding the figurative smoking gun tend to be financiers and lawyers. They are the ones who usually make the rules. If you need proof you merely have to examine the sorts of degrees held by most of Congress.
There is no good or acceptable reason to do anything with a vulnerability other than to first report it to the developer, and then release it to the public if they fail to patch it within an acceptable timeframe.
"Good" and "acceptable" are concepts very much in the eye of the beholder. For some the only "good" is how much money they can make and the rest of the world can burn as far as they care. The only thing "acceptable" to them is a large enough price. This is how much of Wall Street works so why should we expect the market for security flaws to be much different? The greater good is a concept as alien to such people as a Martian.
Make no mistake, that market is as black as the devil's heart.
Apple can raise the price enough that thieves can't afford to outbid them. Granted, Apple can't outbid NSA and the other such global organizations. But they can outbid the small time thieves.
Actually Apple can out bid NSA if they want to. By a lot. The entire Intelligence budget for the USA is somewhere around $80 billion per year. This includes CIA, NSA, FBI, DIA, and the rest. Apple's profits last year were about $45 billion. So yeah, NSA isn't going to be able to outbid Apple unless Apple doesn't care.
Going to Mars makes no sense anyway, it's just another flag planting exercise.
While flag planting would be a part of it, going to Mars by necessity will have to be more than that. It will have varying amounts of finance, exploration, science, and engineering as drivers. As for whether it makes sense, we're going to disagree about the sensibility of it I think. Nearly all exploration and discovery isn't objectively justifiable prior to the mission. When Columbus sailed across the Atlantic he had no idea what he might find. That's the nature of discovery. Blanket statements that it doesn't make sense are simply not true because you can only know that post-mission.
Mars is the politically stated goal for NASA because anything else requires 5 minutes explanation to idiot politicians who require "announcables".
What is so bad about that? We're feeding their interests in a way that aligns with the goals of exploration. Maybe it's a little disingenuous at times but I think the end justifies the means in this case. It's always like that when you have to go begging for money for a science endeavor.
A small area of the planet being radioactive. But that's ok, with no life as we know it, not much weather to blow stuff around, and lots of land mass, we've got plenty of chances at another try.
"Not much weather"? You mean except for the global dust storms that could distribute fallout far and wide? With dust that sticks to everything like styrofoam peanuts?
We already have relatively small pressurized water reactors.
Not a grand idea when you cannot have people monitoring it onsite 24/7 who are able to effect repairs. Requires high pressure piping and containment (heavy and $$) which increases the problems if there is a loss of coolant incident (not a trivial consideration). Lots of problematic failure modes not easily reconciled to space travel. Plus there is the fact that you need water which Mars has but not in abundance or easily accessible. You don't want to ship the water there
It seems like a reactor that could power a submarine would be the right size for a small colony of people.
Water as a coolant works great on a submarine when you are literally in an ocean of it. Not so obviously great of an idea on a planet where water is substantially harder to come by.
Maybe they could figure out a way to include the human waste processing function in the reactor system? i.e. cool the reactor by peeing on it.
??? That's like trying to put out a forest fire by peeing on it.
Putting the "nuclear waste" problem in perspective: The output from a single 800-1000MWe PWR or BWR nuclear plant over its 60 year lifespan is almost enough to fill an olympic-size swimming pool and is relatively safe to handle in 300 years (not 200,000)
Some waste is safe to handle within a few decades. Some is not safe to handle for over a thousand years. Furthermore the fact that the waste is comparatively small in volume only slightly mitigates the toxicity of it and long term storage of high level waste is still an ongoing problem. And of course if things go very wrong as has happened a few times the pollution from a nuclear disaster can be widespread and render significant areas uninhabitable which is not a concern with solar/wind.
Thorium cycle systems with continuous chemical processing would eliminate the ~85% waste on the input side (enriching uranium makes a LOT of depleted uranium waste) and the 99% waste on the output side. This would reduce the waste down to about a basketball size per year - again, safe to handle in about 300 years.
Thorium cycle systems are not in widespread use and a largely irrelevant to the discussion as it exists today. Not saying they are a bad idea but they simply are not the technology in use as things stand.
Sounds like a serious impediment to ever having enough charging stations, if every charging station must be duplicated 10 times over because of a different connector.
There is some fragmentation in charging station connectors though this is more standardized than a lot of terminations.
The wire harness industry is about the most fragmented industry one can imagine. I have an entire bookshelf 20 feet from me filled with dense catalogs of connectors and terminals of every conceivable size, shape, and type. And new ones are being designed all the time, mostly for no good reason. Engineers are REALLY bad about designing stuff to use just a few basic types of standard off the shelf terminals/connectors.
Do you repair harnesses, or just build them? I'd like some advice on which brand of harness tools is worth owning. I need to dick around with some mini-iso connectors, which use micro power timer pinning.
We are a contract manufacturer so most of what we do is custom original products. We do some repair work though.
As far as tool brands go there is no simple answer because it depends on what you are trying to do. As a general proposition though the company that made the terminal probably has recommended tooling that is of adequate quality. For most terminals there are detailed crimp specification and tools designed specifically for the terminal to be crimped if you are going to do it properly. Typically if you are buying your terminals from one of the big manufacturers (TE, Molex, Delphi, etc) they have tooling designed for their specific parts and it's typically good quality. TE probably has the broadest options so I usually start there and most of the tooling our company has is from TE and Molex. You can look up terminal crimp height specifications on the TE website through their applicators (used on presses) and they have a lot for competitors products too.
I know TE makes micro power timing terminals so that would be a good place to start. A quality hand tool will typically costs several hundred dollars though so you might find it more economical to get a multi-purpose crimp tool which will make a poor crimp and solder the wire in the crimp. We do this all the time for customers who don't want to pay for proper tooling. It's not pretty but it works fine. You can drop a TON of money on crimp tooling in a hurry but unless you are making production parts you should be able to get away with crude crimps + soldering. Ebay isn't a bad place to get used tooling at a discount in many cases if you know the part number for the tool you are looking for.
How did we ever end up with all TVs using the same standard coax cable? This whole thing about companies not being able to standardize seems to be a very new thing.
Not at all. There is a rather large difference between standardizing on a simple wire termination versus standardizing battery packs weighing hundreds of pounds. Especially given that we haven't figured out what an optimal battery pack design might look like. Battery packs are large enough that you have to design the car around them so getting car companies to agree on a common one is going to be nigh impossible.
And if you are looking for standardization, wire terminals are the absolutely wrong place to look. I happen to manage a company that makes wire harnesses. The number of different terminal options numbers in the hundreds of thousands easily. Aside from a few areas is about as non-standardized an industry as you can find.
A car back in the early days could carry extra gasoline. An electric car can't carry extra batteries for the same range extension, because the extra volume and weight would be prohibitive.
No but they can carry a generator and gasoline for the occasions where it might be an issue. Another option would be a towed range extender if the car were designed for one. Admittedly these are stop-gap measures while the technology is young but they are proven viable options and do not require massive infrastructure upgrades to work.
Ad-hoc battery replacement is another one, where you switch out packs of batteries. One problem with that is that you lose your original new battery for someone's old battery, which wasn't attractive for users in the test pilot. And it requires standardization between brands, or it will be too expensive to have wide coverage.
Unlikely to happen any time soon because it requires too much standardization between car makers and battery vendors to be viable. It also has something of the chicken and egg problem in infrastructure that keeps hydrogen from being viable. You need a critical mass of standardized battery packs to make it worth bothering. Nobody makes standard batteries because no cars accept them and cars aren't designed to accept them because standard batteries don't exist. It's not a dumb idea but network effects will probably keep it off the market.
For now, hybrids seem to be a better solution. You can take advantage of the immensely higher energy density of gasoline and rapid fueling, while still having the benefits of electric motors.
Depends on the use case. Honestly an EV with a range of 300 miles would cover 99%+ of the driving I do these days and I think most people are similar. There are use cases where a hybrid makes tons of sense but they mostly are for cases where long range driving is likely to be routine. I think hybrids actually make the most sense for work trucks and cargo vehicles. I'm kind of astonished there isn't a hybrid pickup on the market. Tons of torque for towing, improved fuel economy, and the hybrid can power the electric system for power tools. Probably more than any other use case it makes total sense for a hybrid pickup.
So why not take that excess electricity and make hydrogen out of it?
And do what with the hydrogen? There isn't enough demand or storage capacity and certainly no relationship between the production of the excess energy and need for hydrogen.
It's harder than you think, any sort of 'storage' will be either potentially highly toxic (as in batteries), require lots of investment (like hydro) and take up lots and lots of space
"Toxic"? As opposed to fossil fuels or uranium which are just so amazingly safe? Most batteries are recyclable (including lithium batteries) - the only issue is whether it is economical to recycle them. We're looking for the least worst option and everything indicates batteries + solar/wind are likely a major part of the least worst options. Any toxicity from batteries is easily justified in the face of the alternatives.
Hydro simply isn't an option in most locations. It's fine where it's available but the capacity for it is limited and regional.
It regularly gets 110F here in summer and people still live. In Canada it often gets below 0F and people live.
You seem to have missed the point. 110F is survivable. 110C is not.
The measurements 0F to 100F were based upon what at the time were perceived as the min and max temperatures the weather reached in Europe. That's not very scientific, even if it is meaningful.
That's not true at all. "The lower defining point, 0 F, was established as the temperature of a solution of brine made from equal parts of ice and salt. Further limits were established as the melting point of ice (32 F) and his best estimate of the average human body temperature (96 F, about 2.6 F less than the modern value due to a later redefinition of the scale). The scale is now usually defined by two fixed points: the temperature at which water freezes into ice is defined as 32 F, and the boiling point of water is defined to be 212 F, a 180 F separation, as defined at sea level and standard atmospheric pressure."
You can perceive the difference just about in 1C change. You can't perceive the difference in 1F change. A Centigrade is more meaningful to a human being as far as perception goes.
Again not true at all. I absolutely can perceive a 1F difference in temperature and so can most people. In fact we can detect temperature difference much smaller than 1F in many circumstances. If anything centigrade is a bit too coarse grained in that regard.
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There is an Outer Space Treaty that prohibits "weapons of mass destruction" in space. So, no nukes. However, kinetic bombardment weapons have been in development for some time now.
A powerful enough kinetic bombardment system IS a WMD. Just because nukes, biological, and chemical weapons are currently considered WMDs doesn't mean we can't add to the list. When you can get nuclear level yields by dropping an asteroid on a city you'll have a pretty hard time arguing that it isn't a WMD.
The ultimate space weapon could be deployed from the moon.
What weapon? Why would you need the moon to deploy it? One can deploy hugely destructive civilization ending weapons from near earth orbit without needing to go to the trouble of going to the moon.
Whomever has control of the moon(as in..actually there), will control the Earth provided the human race survives that long.
That sentence doesn't make much sense. How exactly do you figure someone on the moon (a place with no food, little water, no atmosphere, and no economy) is going to control earth? By threatening with WMDs? We already have that situation in case you forgot. Do you think people on Earth couldn't shoot those on the moon just as easily as the reverse? I think you've been reading too much science fiction.
They will answer that flying is not a public right nor service; they are private airlines.
Flying is not a public right but the right to travel is and the TSA is most certainly a public service since it is a part of the federal government. Furthermore the airlines fall under the jurisdiction of the FAA as well as various transit authorities so if the airlines don't want to treat passengers nicely we can always revoke their right to use the runways which are routinely taxpayer funded.
And you can fly on other private airlines (like JetSuite X or Surf Air) where you do not have TSA checks.
So only rich people get to enjoy their civil rights?
If you voluntarily agree to a search, then it can't be a 4th amendment violation.
Since freedom of travel is a civil right and air travel is the only realistic option for travel in many cases, it's pretty hard to argue that the search is in any way voluntary.
The TSA is the biggest federal employment program ever.
Incorrect. Currently that would be our grossly oversized and over funded military which employs well over a million people directly and quite a few more indirectly. The TSA is a rounding error by comparison. And irritating boil of a rounding error but small potatoes in the grand scheme of government waste.
'TSA cannot confirm or deny the results of internal tests and condemns the release of any information that could compromise our nation's security."
I'll see their ass covering and raise them that "I condemn failing to release any information that will result in ineffective national security and consider hiding such information to be tantamount to providing aid and comfort to our enemies".
Calling it the 'largest battery' is a bit of a misnomer. It more appropriately would be called the largest group of batteries.
You are confusing the terms battery with cell. All batteries consist of one or more cells. So the word battery is the correct one regardless of size. A large array of connected batteries is still a battery.
What is the price if he delivers on time?
Whatever they agree to in the contract.
Why is that not in any of these articles?
Because they are probably still negotiating.
Why "from the US"? The cells are made in the far east, and the technology around them provided by the French company.
From the US because that's where Musk's company builds stuff. Where the components come from is a separate issue.
It seems inefficient if they were to ship the cells from China/Japan to the US first, and that the short delivery time is precisely due to Australia being much closer.
You are assuming they aren't carrying any inventory of the battery cells and other electronics in question. In reality they probably have substantial stocks so it's not as if they are ordering everything from scratch. That's the beauty of building multiple products using standard components.
But anyhow, isn't this olds? Unless my old brain suffers from Deja Vu again, wasn't this news many months ago?
Musk made the 100 day offer months ago. Now it appears they have taken him up on the bet. Hence it is now newsworthy.
QVC has actually done a lot to keep up technologically. They make a good deal of revenue from purchases made by people watching their streams via their apps on mobile, Roku, AppleTV, Facebook, and their website.
And yet the average age of their shoppers is still quite old and nearly all of their customer (95%) are repeat customers. So that implies that they are capturing the more technologically savvy of the customers they already had. Even my 98 year old grand mother has an iPad. It's easy enough to advertise an app to facilitate purchases so QVC realizing a lot of revenue though app purchases doesn't actually surprise me much.. They're just making it easier for their existing customer to do business with them which is smart. I'm not being critical of anyone - if QVC has an audience and they make their customers happy then good for them. I don't get the appeal of shopping that way but lots of people do weird shit I don't fully comprehend.
I'm willing to lay odds that QVC doesn't move a heck of a lot of product through Roku purchases though...
Somehow Home Shopping Network is worth 2 billion dollars even with Amazon in the arena. I imagine people throwing money at the screen when any commercial airs; somebody must be buying. I can't understand why.
Inertia and habits play a large part in it. The average age of a QVC shopper is 53 and 95% of their sales come from repeat shoppers. So we're mostly talking about older people who got discovered QVC before the internet was a thing continue to shop with them because its an old habit they are comfortable with. It seems unlikely that younger shoppers will come on board so the days of QVC are likely numbered but not for a few decades more.
The accountants make the rules, and everybody knows it.
Speaking as an actual accountant I can assure you this is not actually true. Accountants can facilitate getting around the rules or in pointing out where the rules have nasty sharp teeth best avoided but they rarely have much say in what the actual rules are. Accountants aren't the ones robbing the mythical bank - they are the ones that provide the floor plans and sometimes drive the getaway car. The ones holding the figurative smoking gun tend to be financiers and lawyers. They are the ones who usually make the rules. If you need proof you merely have to examine the sorts of degrees held by most of Congress.
There is no good or acceptable reason to do anything with a vulnerability other than to first report it to the developer, and then release it to the public if they fail to patch it within an acceptable timeframe.
"Good" and "acceptable" are concepts very much in the eye of the beholder. For some the only "good" is how much money they can make and the rest of the world can burn as far as they care. The only thing "acceptable" to them is a large enough price. This is how much of Wall Street works so why should we expect the market for security flaws to be much different? The greater good is a concept as alien to such people as a Martian.
Make no mistake, that market is as black as the devil's heart.
Quite so.
Apple can raise the price enough that thieves can't afford to outbid them. Granted, Apple can't outbid NSA and the other such global organizations. But they can outbid the small time thieves.
Actually Apple can out bid NSA if they want to. By a lot. The entire Intelligence budget for the USA is somewhere around $80 billion per year. This includes CIA, NSA, FBI, DIA, and the rest. Apple's profits last year were about $45 billion. So yeah, NSA isn't going to be able to outbid Apple unless Apple doesn't care.
Going to Mars makes no sense anyway, it's just another flag planting exercise.
While flag planting would be a part of it, going to Mars by necessity will have to be more than that. It will have varying amounts of finance, exploration, science, and engineering as drivers. As for whether it makes sense, we're going to disagree about the sensibility of it I think. Nearly all exploration and discovery isn't objectively justifiable prior to the mission. When Columbus sailed across the Atlantic he had no idea what he might find. That's the nature of discovery. Blanket statements that it doesn't make sense are simply not true because you can only know that post-mission.
Mars is the politically stated goal for NASA because anything else requires 5 minutes explanation to idiot politicians who require "announcables".
What is so bad about that? We're feeding their interests in a way that aligns with the goals of exploration. Maybe it's a little disingenuous at times but I think the end justifies the means in this case. It's always like that when you have to go begging for money for a science endeavor.
A small area of the planet being radioactive. But that's ok, with no life as we know it, not much weather to blow stuff around, and lots of land mass, we've got plenty of chances at another try.
"Not much weather"? You mean except for the global dust storms that could distribute fallout far and wide? With dust that sticks to everything like styrofoam peanuts?
We already have relatively small pressurized water reactors.
Not a grand idea when you cannot have people monitoring it onsite 24/7 who are able to effect repairs. Requires high pressure piping and containment (heavy and $$) which increases the problems if there is a loss of coolant incident (not a trivial consideration). Lots of problematic failure modes not easily reconciled to space travel. Plus there is the fact that you need water which Mars has but not in abundance or easily accessible. You don't want to ship the water there
It seems like a reactor that could power a submarine would be the right size for a small colony of people.
Water as a coolant works great on a submarine when you are literally in an ocean of it. Not so obviously great of an idea on a planet where water is substantially harder to come by.
Maybe they could figure out a way to include the human waste processing function in the reactor system? i.e. cool the reactor by peeing on it.
??? That's like trying to put out a forest fire by peeing on it.
Hmm, doing what amounts to a controlled crash (possibly uncontrolled) on Mars with a fission reactor. What could possibly go wrong?
Putting the "nuclear waste" problem in perspective: The output from a single 800-1000MWe PWR or BWR nuclear plant over its 60 year lifespan is almost enough to fill an olympic-size swimming pool and is relatively safe to handle in 300 years (not 200,000)
Some waste is safe to handle within a few decades. Some is not safe to handle for over a thousand years. Furthermore the fact that the waste is comparatively small in volume only slightly mitigates the toxicity of it and long term storage of high level waste is still an ongoing problem. And of course if things go very wrong as has happened a few times the pollution from a nuclear disaster can be widespread and render significant areas uninhabitable which is not a concern with solar/wind.
Thorium cycle systems with continuous chemical processing would eliminate the ~85% waste on the input side (enriching uranium makes a LOT of depleted uranium waste) and the 99% waste on the output side. This would reduce the waste down to about a basketball size per year - again, safe to handle in about 300 years.
Thorium cycle systems are not in widespread use and a largely irrelevant to the discussion as it exists today. Not saying they are a bad idea but they simply are not the technology in use as things stand.
Sounds like a serious impediment to ever having enough charging stations, if every charging station must be duplicated 10 times over because of a different connector.
There is some fragmentation in charging station connectors though this is more standardized than a lot of terminations.
The wire harness industry is about the most fragmented industry one can imagine. I have an entire bookshelf 20 feet from me filled with dense catalogs of connectors and terminals of every conceivable size, shape, and type. And new ones are being designed all the time, mostly for no good reason. Engineers are REALLY bad about designing stuff to use just a few basic types of standard off the shelf terminals/connectors.
Do you repair harnesses, or just build them? I'd like some advice on which brand of harness tools is worth owning. I need to dick around with some mini-iso connectors, which use micro power timer pinning.
We are a contract manufacturer so most of what we do is custom original products. We do some repair work though.
As far as tool brands go there is no simple answer because it depends on what you are trying to do. As a general proposition though the company that made the terminal probably has recommended tooling that is of adequate quality. For most terminals there are detailed crimp specification and tools designed specifically for the terminal to be crimped if you are going to do it properly. Typically if you are buying your terminals from one of the big manufacturers (TE, Molex, Delphi, etc) they have tooling designed for their specific parts and it's typically good quality. TE probably has the broadest options so I usually start there and most of the tooling our company has is from TE and Molex. You can look up terminal crimp height specifications on the TE website through their applicators (used on presses) and they have a lot for competitors products too.
I know TE makes micro power timing terminals so that would be a good place to start. A quality hand tool will typically costs several hundred dollars though so you might find it more economical to get a multi-purpose crimp tool which will make a poor crimp and solder the wire in the crimp. We do this all the time for customers who don't want to pay for proper tooling. It's not pretty but it works fine. You can drop a TON of money on crimp tooling in a hurry but unless you are making production parts you should be able to get away with crude crimps + soldering. Ebay isn't a bad place to get used tooling at a discount in many cases if you know the part number for the tool you are looking for.
How did we ever end up with all TVs using the same standard coax cable? This whole thing about companies not being able to standardize seems to be a very new thing.
Not at all. There is a rather large difference between standardizing on a simple wire termination versus standardizing battery packs weighing hundreds of pounds. Especially given that we haven't figured out what an optimal battery pack design might look like. Battery packs are large enough that you have to design the car around them so getting car companies to agree on a common one is going to be nigh impossible.
And if you are looking for standardization, wire terminals are the absolutely wrong place to look. I happen to manage a company that makes wire harnesses. The number of different terminal options numbers in the hundreds of thousands easily. Aside from a few areas is about as non-standardized an industry as you can find.
A car back in the early days could carry extra gasoline. An electric car can't carry extra batteries for the same range extension, because the extra volume and weight would be prohibitive.
No but they can carry a generator and gasoline for the occasions where it might be an issue. Another option would be a towed range extender if the car were designed for one. Admittedly these are stop-gap measures while the technology is young but they are proven viable options and do not require massive infrastructure upgrades to work.
Ad-hoc battery replacement is another one, where you switch out packs of batteries. One problem with that is that you lose your original new battery for someone's old battery, which wasn't attractive for users in the test pilot. And it requires standardization between brands, or it will be too expensive to have wide coverage.
Unlikely to happen any time soon because it requires too much standardization between car makers and battery vendors to be viable. It also has something of the chicken and egg problem in infrastructure that keeps hydrogen from being viable. You need a critical mass of standardized battery packs to make it worth bothering. Nobody makes standard batteries because no cars accept them and cars aren't designed to accept them because standard batteries don't exist. It's not a dumb idea but network effects will probably keep it off the market.
For now, hybrids seem to be a better solution. You can take advantage of the immensely higher energy density of gasoline and rapid fueling, while still having the benefits of electric motors.
Depends on the use case. Honestly an EV with a range of 300 miles would cover 99%+ of the driving I do these days and I think most people are similar. There are use cases where a hybrid makes tons of sense but they mostly are for cases where long range driving is likely to be routine. I think hybrids actually make the most sense for work trucks and cargo vehicles. I'm kind of astonished there isn't a hybrid pickup on the market. Tons of torque for towing, improved fuel economy, and the hybrid can power the electric system for power tools. Probably more than any other use case it makes total sense for a hybrid pickup.
So why not take that excess electricity and make hydrogen out of it?
And do what with the hydrogen? There isn't enough demand or storage capacity and certainly no relationship between the production of the excess energy and need for hydrogen.
It's harder than you think, any sort of 'storage' will be either potentially highly toxic (as in batteries), require lots of investment (like hydro) and take up lots and lots of space
"Toxic"? As opposed to fossil fuels or uranium which are just so amazingly safe? Most batteries are recyclable (including lithium batteries) - the only issue is whether it is economical to recycle them. We're looking for the least worst option and everything indicates batteries + solar/wind are likely a major part of the least worst options. Any toxicity from batteries is easily justified in the face of the alternatives.
Hydro simply isn't an option in most locations. It's fine where it's available but the capacity for it is limited and regional.
Who cares if it is "livable"?
People who want to live.
It regularly gets 110F here in summer and people still live. In Canada it often gets below 0F and people live.
You seem to have missed the point. 110F is survivable. 110C is not.
The measurements 0F to 100F were based upon what at the time were perceived as the min and max temperatures the weather reached in Europe. That's not very scientific, even if it is meaningful.
That's not true at all. "The lower defining point, 0 F, was established as the temperature of a solution of brine made from equal parts of ice and salt. Further limits were established as the melting point of ice (32 F) and his best estimate of the average human body temperature (96 F, about 2.6 F less than the modern value due to a later redefinition of the scale). The scale is now usually defined by two fixed points: the temperature at which water freezes into ice is defined as 32 F, and the boiling point of water is defined to be 212 F, a 180 F separation, as defined at sea level and standard atmospheric pressure."
You can perceive the difference just about in 1C change. You can't perceive the difference in 1F change. A Centigrade is more meaningful to a human being as far as perception goes.
Again not true at all. I absolutely can perceive a 1F difference in temperature and so can most people. In fact we can detect temperature difference much smaller than 1F in many circumstances. If anything centigrade is a bit too coarse grained in that regard.