It also depends on the emissions. SULEV standards reflect only Hydrocarbons, Nitrogen oxides, and Carbon monoxide. They don't reflect CO2, I.E. energy. There's no theoretical reason a gas Hummer could not be an SULEV or PZEV. I was talking about CO2 in this case. With wind you're cleaner than all of the above, obviously.
I agree with your post, but I have to warn you about Ultracaps. They are just too darned heavy (10X as heavy as lead acid) and there doesn't appear to be much room from progress.
Electric cars are built in vain, most electricity comes from coal power
Most electricity comes from stuff other than coal power, and none from oil. Electric cars, even on a coal grid, emit less than gas cars.
require oil powered vehicles to mine
Actually, at least in Europe, most mining equipment is electric. But the costs of mining and manufacturing are much lower that the vehicle will save over its life.
copper, lithium and other chemicals which once disposed of are more toxic to the environment than the exhaust from the latest combustion engines.
This is not true, even with nasty old lead-acid. All those chemicals get recycled. 97% of lead acid batteries get recycled (the DIY EV builders are probably approaching 100% recycling rate). Tesla has already set up a system to recycle dead lithiums. There is not a lithium shortage, but all let others argue that one.
Not only that but electricity rates will have to go up as the margins of electric companies need to rise to keep up with infrastructure costs which will offset any cost savings from electric cars.
80% of all road transport could be electric powered if the cars are charged at night - no new powerplants required. The cynic in me expects electric companies to use cars as an excuse to raise rates even further.
Natural gas, hydrogen cars and mass transit are what's going to be the future of transportation, in my opinion.
Natural gas is good, but it still emits CO2.
Hydrogen has to be produced using natural gas, biofuels or electricity. In the case of natural gas and biofuels, this might make things more efficient overall by swapping engines for fuel cells. In the case of electric hydrogen production, this is worse than electric cars. Hydrogen cars in such a scenario would consume 3-4 times as much electricity per mile as electric cars, because fuel cells aren't very efficient. Biofuel production would have all the same problems as normal biofuel production - water, huge land area, etc. Hydrogen cars are also even more expensive - to build a hydrogen geo metro would cost about $100,000 right now. For that same price you could get a Tesla roadster, or build a high performance electric conversion
Mass transit is worse than electric cars. Right now, a japanese train consumes about 0.35 MJ/passenger-km = 156 watt-hours/passenger mile. A modded plugin prius from Google consumes 131.5 watt-hours/mile in city driving. A Tesla or Rav-4 consumes 250 watt-hours/mile down the highway. You should actually divide those numbers by 1.54, to produce passenger mile figures. In both cases, they are equal to or better than a train.
"This experimental setup was so simple, that your grandmother could understand it."
Two choices, pick one or both:
This experimental setup was so simple, even the president could understand it.
This experimental setup was so simple, even the former president could understand it.
BZZZT. Depends on the power source of the transit and the car. Gas/Diesel is virtually the same. Electric is always better than gas and diesel. But an electric car is better than an electric train.
IR dots that are being projected by the device in order to produce a depth-map. This processing is clearly mostly trivial.
No it isn't. It's really important, especially in a cheap package like this.
The magic of the Kinect as used by Microsoft is whats going on inside the xbox where they take the optical image, and with assistance from the depth map, detect people and construct a simplified 3d model (usable for input triggers) of how their body is oriented.
Who cares about detecting people? That's already been done. There's already some Kinect 3D model stuff. What I care about is SLAM and other robotics applications. We just went from $3000 dollar cameras to $150 dollar cameras.
False. The Kinect has hardware (ASIC's, IIRC) to do stereo vision, as well as an infrared textured light projector. This hardware does textured-light stereo, which is very computationally intensive task. You're getting RGB+D images for the computational price of reading from a webcam, instead the cost setting up a textured light projecter, reading two webcams and running stereo software. You also get a stable, well calibrated system, instead of what you'd get with building your own. It also costs $150 instead of $200, BTW.
Seattle is the sort of urban area that approaches one traffic fatality per day.
You also have to consider the number of people who take each system. Many, many, many more people are driving cars. What matters is fatalities per unit of transportation provided. That's what the chart compares. If we switched to trains, that fatality rate would arguably scale up to the same one death per day.
The closed tracks system is way better, but it remains to be seen if transit planners will choose it over light rail (which is sort of trendy right now).
However, I think cities are going to be abandoned - in fact passenger transportation in general is going to be dead. Why? Because of telepresence - starting with simply being there via a robot, and ending with being able to manipulate objects. First, we'll start to see telepresence for executives. Then for office workers (think about how many people drive 40 miles to shuffle paper). Eventually we'll have officeless companies. We'll also be performing "bail-outs" for robots. If we can make a robot that is say, 99% reliable but needs human help the other 1% percent of the time, then we could imagine a system where a human is called (via the internet) to help the robot out of its trap.
Under this scheme, I think many people will leave cities. We'll have people in middle of nowhere, Kansas living in mansions for half the price of rent in the cities. They might drive to Yellowstone on the weekends, but for the most part, they won't be going anywhere.
The owner's TCO for a motor vehicle is not the societal cost. The societal cost includes highways and other infrastructure (not paid for entirely with that gas tax), the wars we go to so that Americans can have gasoline at 1/5 the price of much of the world, the unnecessary deaths and injuries, the time cost to the individual who can't do any activity but drive while in transit, the environmental impact, the various issues that automobile transit heaps upon both cities and suburbs - sprawl, traffic, etc. So, I don't think most automobile owners are paying a fraction of the actual cost of their vehicles.
If you saw, in the GP, I linked to an article that pretty exhaustively calculated the excess cost of a car. It did not include the time or traffic jam problems, but those aren't really external to the car. Those are paid for by car drivers, apparently willingly, because they aren't up and leaving for New York or other transit dependent places.
Before you are so sure about the energy cost of mass transit, you need to consider apples and apples.
We're doing apples to apples comparisons here. The way the energy consumption of these electric vehicles are rated is by measuring how much electricity flows out of the outlets and into the system, and dividing it by the total number of passenger miles provided by the system. The losses of batteries, chargers, centenary wires, etc. Now, electric cars won't work because of the range, but electric cars with short range and small generators (like the Chevy Volt or those Google Priuses) will work. This is really comparable to a transit system of 80% electric trains, 20% buses. The result is that the cars end up more efficient, even though they have to cope with chargers, battery packs, engines, and emissions control equipment.
Because the cars use less energy, it follows that the costs of wars and pollution are lower for the cars. They'll end up being zero when the modders finish up with all the alternative fuel conversions.
Safety, however. That's one that's real close. However, at least in US urban driving, the result is that trains end up more dangerous.
While it is unclear (to me at least) whether public transport or cars are better, one thing is heard loud and clear: the Japanese do transit best. The Japanese have the lowest car use in the G8, at 50% of passenger miles in cars (USA - 98%, UK - 85%). However, the Japanese don't pay all that much for gas. They pay around $4.24/gallon, which is a bit more, but not all that much more. When you take into account their greater energy efficiency, they probably end up paying the same. Why do they take transit, then? Because it doesn't suck.
Oh, but the right believes that Public Transportation is "big government that can't support itself".
Actually, it is pretty expensive, and not very energy efficient. Here's a table of efficiencies. Energy efficiency (article is a direct link to a DOE report on the subject). The most important thing to look at is the comparison of the Telsa roadster and the Japanese Train - it's close. Japan is the biggest public transport riding countries in the G8 - so all the typical responses about how trains would be better if people already rode them go out the window. It gets even better. If you divide the Telsa's numbers by 1.57 (the average number of people in a car), you get almost exactly the same number. But it gets better. Google has been testing some plug-in hybrid Escapes and Priuses, and they've been running around about half the Telsa's numbers in average driving (those Tesla numbers are straight and level at 65 mph). What that means is that these cars are more efficient than the train, with only one person in them. You can even compare the gas cars to buses, and note how they edge out buses, ever so slightly.
Car drivers pay about 80-90 of their costs, equivalent to a 11 cent gas tax increase to make up the difference. This works out to about 0.05 cents per mile. Edmunds estimates the TCO of a new 2011 Hyundai Accent at $0.44 per mile. Make that $0.45 to make up for the shortfall and you're done. That includes, gas, insurance, taxes, the tax shortfall, parking, highways, depreciation, the highway patrol, financing, the works. Of course, that's a brand new car. What if you run an old beater into the ground, like many poor people do? A lot of those costs go out the window.
By far, insurance is the biggest cost. A robocar could avoid much of that cost. Public transport may be safer in some cases, and that is a valid point.
So, instead, we're going to implement fine control of individual's actions, which is "being tough on crime".
It'll be a disaster. Fortunately, we're not going to have this: the official response.
Actually, it's not all that bad. In California, 1 watt of solar is approximately 2 kWh/year. The volt driven all 40 electric miles is going to need about 3650 kWh / year, or 1825 watts of solar. You need about 16 m^2 of solar array to power it. That solar, however, from the cheapest I could find, is about $3200. That includes all the loses of the charger, the sunset, clouds, etc.
People Don't Want To Understand Cybercrime
on
The Great Cyberheist
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
People think cybercrime is about misbegotten geniuses launch attacks using incomprehensible methods. They think cyberwar is about vast arrays of foreign hackers breaking into our high tech military systems and stealing our secrets. However, that's not what cybercrime and cyberwarfare are about. Cybercrime and cyberwarfare are about people bruteforcing some bigshot's low strength password. It's about some stupid spyware program exploiting some obvious old bug in windows and emailing your credit card to the former USSR. It's about your grandma downloading a set of "kitty" icons and infecting her computer with a botnet virus. It's about some small-time hacker calling up one secretary and getting the CEO's username, and then calling another and getting the CEO's password. These problems can't be solved by advanced security systems. They have to be solved by people. It's kind of like trying to fight cave-dwelling terrorists with a high-tech stealth bomber.
Yeah, well it does not work everywhere. That's why we have these great things called copper cables to ship electricity where it is needed. I do not think all solar can practically fit on roofs. I think residential + commercial + a bit of Arizona can do it. Worse case scenario, a lot of Arizona would be used up, but that's not really a big deal.
Your post is great, but I have a few issues with it:
1) A favorite is Solar, due to its abysmal energy conversion efficiency.
Solar's energy conversion efficiency is low, but this really isn't relevant. Most solar panels are about 20% efficient. When you ask about the efficiency of a system, you have to ask what the total course of the system is, from sunlight to wheels/house power/chemical production. What this basically means is the total land area needed to sustain a person. If that land area is too big, that's no good. If a system has 1% efficiency but ends up not requiring any space, that's not a big deal. The real favorite of the renewable energy deniers is the ethanol and hydrogen. They prove that hydrogen fuel cells or ethanol won't work and then claim we're dead. This is like saying that a car clearly is unaffordable, because you can't afford a collectors edition Corvette, while ignoring the fact that you can afford Honda Civic.
3) "Wont power our cars!" Which, of course it wont, if your car is designed to run on hydrocarbons.
Actually it will. Worse case scenario, we have the technology to use electricity, CO2, and water to make hydrocarbons and oxygen. Yes, it's horribly inefficient, but in a world where EV's fail and RE is cheap, it would make sense. It might also be a sensible way to make plastics and other oil based stuff.
2) inferior drive distances (battery technology is rapidly resolving this.)
This is actually a big problem, but battery technology can't fix it. The problem is that outlets just can't pump out enough power for the system to be recharged in a reasonable amount of time. The real solution is to build something like the Chevy Volt, that can consume synthetic petroleum and biofuels. Doing this lets you use cheaper but heavier battery technologies, like Edison NiFe batteries.
Did you know that most of the power generated and pushed into the existing grid gets bled out as wast heat and or radio emissions?
This actually isn't true. The electrical grid, as wires, is about 95% efficient. However, the power plants aren't very efficient, ranging from 30% to 60%. This is because of the Carnot limits that impact the conversion of heat to work in a heat engine.
For example if we switched to Solar energy, we'd need to pave over Nevada with light-sensitive silicon. And that still wouldn't provide a way to fuel cars or freight trucks.
Nonsense. If we switched to solar PV, we'd need roughly 70,000 km^2 of panels. That's based on US energy consumption, taking in to account clouds, day/night, all the stuff solar deniers like to pretend is an issue. Now, 70,000 km^2 sounds like a lot, but it really is about 270 km on a side. Convert that to miles, get 165 miles on a side. Big, but not as big as Nevada. Expensive as hell, sure. But not too big.
Now of course, we could build those cells on our roofs, and cut that by a major number.
It isn't sinking in with the tech crowd here, but the United States is broke.
This is a japanese project, not a US project, but I'll pretend it is.
Oh yeah, tell me about the upcoming research on hot fusion, cold fusion, 80% efficient solar cells, giant ocean wave turbines, lava heat exchangers, induced micro-earthquakes, whatever. But, research is one thing and getting any of these sources able to surplant cheap oil is something else.
Clearly you've never read of what happens when oil really goes away. To do that, set your clock back to wartime in Europe. It wasn't that conservation, panic, or anything else. It was coal gasification city. Everything was powered by wood and coal. There is a hell of a lot of coal (now some people say it's peaked but that just ain't so). Coal can be converted into diesel, gas, plastic. If the Nazi's produced millions of gallons of aviation fuel from coal while their country was under attack by half the world, the United States can produce a lot more in peace time. In fact, 240,000 barrels a day are produced world wide, right here and now. However, coal is really just the start of this process - biomass goes in with no modification. If you have large quantities of hydrogen (which you have if you have a lot of electricity) and CO2 (which you can capture with a high school science experiment scaled up), you have the input of the process. So anything that produces electricity produces oil.
Now, you're probably saying, ooohhh that's a technological fix that can't work. Here's the issue. Every time we're about to run out of something, we find a technical fix. When we ran out of wood, we found coal. When we ran out of whale oil, we found ground oil. When we started to feel the first hits of oil depletion, we found natural gas. We also found nuclear but many people don't want to talk about that. Imagine our society today trying to run on whale oil. It just would not happen. You'd be lucky if you got a week of power out of whale oil.
There is no money to finance the huge capital expenditures needed to transform the energy systems from oil/coal to anything else. The banking system in the USA has imploded: and no one will talk about it.
The real US economy is in San Jose, where VC's are still funding, google is still booming, and green energy investment is everywhere. Those capital costs are falling fast. 9% a year for PV solar, for example. Even though the system blew up, all the people are still there, willing to put in their hours, all the iron is waiting to be mined and the copper to wrought in to wires. Now is a great time for the VC/Warren Buffet mentality to take over from the Chicago school/Wall Street trader mentality. And besides, can't the government just get into more debt:-p. Or maybe the Chinese will fund it.
Anyway, there aren't going to be any giant floating cities in the future. There isn't any money to actually build them.
Depressions like this one last for 10-20 years at most. I know there's talk of fundamental resource depletion, but this depression will be gone and we'll be back to 1998 again. Infact, I suspect green energy booms (from those technological fixes that are impossible) will be one of the things that gets us out of it. Then their will be a lot of money again, and we'll be building more than we can dream of now.
You want a glimpse of the real future? Visit Haiti. Corrupt, bankrupt, stupid, backward, crowded, loud, hopeless, and filled with lots of clueless rich people running around trying to help but doing nothing.
Actually, I don't need to visit Haiti to experience this, I just have to visit a big US city. While it may be fun for misanthrops to believe that humanities' future is bleak, history does not lend support to this prediction.
1. It's really CPU intensive.
2. Distortion. Web cams are not consistently made. While you can solve it, see 1.
3. Vibration and mounting. You'll really have to line up the web cams good, and you'll probably be doing that multiple times in short order.
Stereo's just one of those things where you want an ASIC to do the work, instead of a normal PC.
As I cyberunplugged my cyberelectric cybercar from my cybersolar cyberpanels, I cyberwatched a cybertrain cyberrun down the cyberrailroad cybertracks. I cybersaw a cybercriminal with a cyberski cybermask cyberwalk onto the cybertrain at the cyberstation and cyberpunch a cybermale cyberpassenger who cyberlooked in his cyber20's. Then he cyberstole some cybercash from the cyberpassenger and cyberran cyberaway, and I no longer cybersaw the cybercriminal.
-Cybersample cyberwitness cybertestimony ~2020.
Seriously, cyber is getting to be like the e- prefix.
Slashdot Mirror
It also depends on the emissions. SULEV standards reflect only Hydrocarbons, Nitrogen oxides, and Carbon monoxide. They don't reflect CO2, I.E. energy. There's no theoretical reason a gas Hummer could not be an SULEV or PZEV. I was talking about CO2 in this case. With wind you're cleaner than all of the above, obviously.
I agree with your post, but I have to warn you about Ultracaps. They are just too darned heavy (10X as heavy as lead acid) and there doesn't appear to be much room from progress.
Electric cars are built in vain, most electricity comes from coal power
Most electricity comes from stuff other than coal power, and none from oil. Electric cars, even on a coal grid, emit less than gas cars.
require oil powered vehicles to mine
Actually, at least in Europe, most mining equipment is electric. But the costs of mining and manufacturing are much lower that the vehicle will save over its life.
copper, lithium and other chemicals which once disposed of are more toxic to the environment than the exhaust from the latest combustion engines.
This is not true, even with nasty old lead-acid. All those chemicals get recycled. 97% of lead acid batteries get recycled (the DIY EV builders are probably approaching 100% recycling rate). Tesla has already set up a system to recycle dead lithiums. There is not a lithium shortage, but all let others argue that one.
Not only that but electricity rates will have to go up as the margins of electric companies need to rise to keep up with infrastructure costs which will offset any cost savings from electric cars.
80% of all road transport could be electric powered if the cars are charged at night - no new powerplants required. The cynic in me expects electric companies to use cars as an excuse to raise rates even further.
Natural gas, hydrogen cars and mass transit are what's going to be the future of transportation, in my opinion.
Natural gas is good, but it still emits CO2.
Hydrogen has to be produced using natural gas, biofuels or electricity. In the case of natural gas and biofuels, this might make things more efficient overall by swapping engines for fuel cells. In the case of electric hydrogen production, this is worse than electric cars. Hydrogen cars in such a scenario would consume 3-4 times as much electricity per mile as electric cars, because fuel cells aren't very efficient. Biofuel production would have all the same problems as normal biofuel production - water, huge land area, etc. Hydrogen cars are also even more expensive - to build a hydrogen geo metro would cost about $100,000 right now. For that same price you could get a Tesla roadster, or build a high performance electric conversion
Mass transit is worse than electric cars. Right now, a japanese train consumes about 0.35 MJ/passenger-km = 156 watt-hours/passenger mile. A modded plugin prius from Google consumes 131.5 watt-hours/mile in city driving. A Tesla or Rav-4 consumes 250 watt-hours/mile down the highway. You should actually divide those numbers by 1.54, to produce passenger mile figures. In both cases, they are equal to or better than a train.
"This experimental setup was so simple, that your grandmother could understand it."
Two choices, pick one or both:
This experimental setup was so simple, even the president could understand it.
This experimental setup was so simple, even the former president could understand it.
Fixed that for em'.
BZZZT. Depends on the power source of the transit and the car. Gas/Diesel is virtually the same. Electric is always better than gas and diesel. But an electric car is better than an electric train.
In Soviet Russia, you fight a cyber war. In Corporate America, cyber war fights you!!!
IR dots that are being projected by the device in order to produce a depth-map. This processing is clearly mostly trivial.
No it isn't. It's really important, especially in a cheap package like this.
The magic of the Kinect as used by Microsoft is whats going on inside the xbox where they take the optical image, and with assistance from the depth map, detect people and construct a simplified 3d model (usable for input triggers) of how their body is oriented.
Who cares about detecting people? That's already been done. There's already some Kinect 3D model stuff. What I care about is SLAM and other robotics applications. We just went from $3000 dollar cameras to $150 dollar cameras.
False. The Kinect has hardware (ASIC's, IIRC) to do stereo vision, as well as an infrared textured light projector. This hardware does textured-light stereo, which is very computationally intensive task. You're getting RGB+D images for the computational price of reading from a webcam, instead the cost setting up a textured light projecter, reading two webcams and running stereo software. You also get a stable, well calibrated system, instead of what you'd get with building your own. It also costs $150 instead of $200, BTW.
The bottom of the oceans? Rich in seafood, unobtainium, nuclear fuels, and wave current power.
Seattle is the sort of urban area that approaches one traffic fatality per day.
You also have to consider the number of people who take each system. Many, many, many more people are driving cars. What matters is fatalities per unit of transportation provided. That's what the chart compares. If we switched to trains, that fatality rate would arguably scale up to the same one death per day.
The closed tracks system is way better, but it remains to be seen if transit planners will choose it over light rail (which is sort of trendy right now).
However, I think cities are going to be abandoned - in fact passenger transportation in general is going to be dead. Why? Because of telepresence - starting with simply being there via a robot, and ending with being able to manipulate objects. First, we'll start to see telepresence for executives. Then for office workers (think about how many people drive 40 miles to shuffle paper). Eventually we'll have officeless companies. We'll also be performing "bail-outs" for robots. If we can make a robot that is say, 99% reliable but needs human help the other 1% percent of the time, then we could imagine a system where a human is called (via the internet) to help the robot out of its trap.
Under this scheme, I think many people will leave cities. We'll have people in middle of nowhere, Kansas living in mansions for half the price of rent in the cities. They might drive to Yellowstone on the weekends, but for the most part, they won't be going anywhere.
Check out this upgrade: wood power!
The owner's TCO for a motor vehicle is not the societal cost. The societal cost includes highways and other infrastructure (not paid for entirely with that gas tax), the wars we go to so that Americans can have gasoline at 1/5 the price of much of the world, the unnecessary deaths and injuries, the time cost to the individual who can't do any activity but drive while in transit, the environmental impact, the various issues that automobile transit heaps upon both cities and suburbs - sprawl, traffic, etc. So, I don't think most automobile owners are paying a fraction of the actual cost of their vehicles.
If you saw, in the GP, I linked to an article that pretty exhaustively calculated the excess cost of a car. It did not include the time or traffic jam problems, but those aren't really external to the car. Those are paid for by car drivers, apparently willingly, because they aren't up and leaving for New York or other transit dependent places.
Before you are so sure about the energy cost of mass transit, you need to consider apples and apples.
We're doing apples to apples comparisons here. The way the energy consumption of these electric vehicles are rated is by measuring how much electricity flows out of the outlets and into the system, and dividing it by the total number of passenger miles provided by the system. The losses of batteries, chargers, centenary wires, etc. Now, electric cars won't work because of the range, but electric cars with short range and small generators (like the Chevy Volt or those Google Priuses) will work. This is really comparable to a transit system of 80% electric trains, 20% buses. The result is that the cars end up more efficient, even though they have to cope with chargers, battery packs, engines, and emissions control equipment.
Because the cars use less energy, it follows that the costs of wars and pollution are lower for the cars. They'll end up being zero when the modders finish up with all the alternative fuel conversions.
Safety, however. That's one that's real close. However, at least in US urban driving, the result is that trains end up more dangerous.
While it is unclear (to me at least) whether public transport or cars are better, one thing is heard loud and clear: the Japanese do transit best. The Japanese have the lowest car use in the G8, at 50% of passenger miles in cars (USA - 98%, UK - 85%). However, the Japanese don't pay all that much for gas. They pay around $4.24/gallon, which is a bit more, but not all that much more. When you take into account their greater energy efficiency, they probably end up paying the same. Why do they take transit, then? Because it doesn't suck.
Oh, but the right believes that Public Transportation is "big government that can't support itself".
Actually, it is pretty expensive, and not very energy efficient. Here's a table of efficiencies. Energy efficiency (article is a direct link to a DOE report on the subject). The most important thing to look at is the comparison of the Telsa roadster and the Japanese Train - it's close. Japan is the biggest public transport riding countries in the G8 - so all the typical responses about how trains would be better if people already rode them go out the window. It gets even better. If you divide the Telsa's numbers by 1.57 (the average number of people in a car), you get almost exactly the same number. But it gets better. Google has been testing some plug-in hybrid Escapes and Priuses, and they've been running around about half the Telsa's numbers in average driving (those Tesla numbers are straight and level at 65 mph). What that means is that these cars are more efficient than the train, with only one person in them. You can even compare the gas cars to buses, and note how they edge out buses, ever so slightly.
Car drivers pay about 80-90 of their costs, equivalent to a 11 cent gas tax increase to make up the difference. This works out to about 0.05 cents per mile. Edmunds estimates the TCO of a new 2011 Hyundai Accent at $0.44 per mile. Make that $0.45 to make up for the shortfall and you're done. That includes, gas, insurance, taxes, the tax shortfall, parking, highways, depreciation, the highway patrol, financing, the works. Of course, that's a brand new car. What if you run an old beater into the ground, like many poor people do? A lot of those costs go out the window.
By far, insurance is the biggest cost. A robocar could avoid much of that cost. Public transport may be safer in some cases, and that is a valid point.
So, instead, we're going to implement fine control of individual's actions, which is "being tough on crime".
It'll be a disaster. Fortunately, we're not going to have this: the official response.
No.
Yes.
5) Willingness to be in beta for a long time
6) Ability to not be evil
Actually, it's not all that bad. In California, 1 watt of solar is approximately 2 kWh/year. The volt driven all 40 electric miles is going to need about 3650 kWh / year, or 1825 watts of solar. You need about 16 m^2 of solar array to power it. That solar, however, from the cheapest I could find, is about $3200. That includes all the loses of the charger, the sunset, clouds, etc.
People think cybercrime is about misbegotten geniuses launch attacks using incomprehensible methods. They think cyberwar is about vast arrays of foreign hackers breaking into our high tech military systems and stealing our secrets. However, that's not what cybercrime and cyberwarfare are about. Cybercrime and cyberwarfare are about people bruteforcing some bigshot's low strength password. It's about some stupid spyware program exploiting some obvious old bug in windows and emailing your credit card to the former USSR. It's about your grandma downloading a set of "kitty" icons and infecting her computer with a botnet virus. It's about some small-time hacker calling up one secretary and getting the CEO's username, and then calling another and getting the CEO's password. These problems can't be solved by advanced security systems. They have to be solved by people. It's kind of like trying to fight cave-dwelling terrorists with a high-tech stealth bomber.
Yeah, well it does not work everywhere. That's why we have these great things called copper cables to ship electricity where it is needed. I do not think all solar can practically fit on roofs. I think residential + commercial + a bit of Arizona can do it. Worse case scenario, a lot of Arizona would be used up, but that's not really a big deal.
1) A favorite is Solar, due to its abysmal energy conversion efficiency.
Solar's energy conversion efficiency is low, but this really isn't relevant. Most solar panels are about 20% efficient. When you ask about the efficiency of a system, you have to ask what the total course of the system is, from sunlight to wheels/house power/chemical production. What this basically means is the total land area needed to sustain a person. If that land area is too big, that's no good. If a system has 1% efficiency but ends up not requiring any space, that's not a big deal. The real favorite of the renewable energy deniers is the ethanol and hydrogen. They prove that hydrogen fuel cells or ethanol won't work and then claim we're dead. This is like saying that a car clearly is unaffordable, because you can't afford a collectors edition Corvette, while ignoring the fact that you can afford Honda Civic.
3) "Wont power our cars!" Which, of course it wont, if your car is designed to run on hydrocarbons.
Actually it will. Worse case scenario, we have the technology to use electricity, CO2, and water to make hydrocarbons and oxygen. Yes, it's horribly inefficient, but in a world where EV's fail and RE is cheap, it would make sense. It might also be a sensible way to make plastics and other oil based stuff.
2) inferior drive distances (battery technology is rapidly resolving this.)
This is actually a big problem, but battery technology can't fix it. The problem is that outlets just can't pump out enough power for the system to be recharged in a reasonable amount of time. The real solution is to build something like the Chevy Volt, that can consume synthetic petroleum and biofuels. Doing this lets you use cheaper but heavier battery technologies, like Edison NiFe batteries.
Did you know that most of the power generated and pushed into the existing grid gets bled out as wast heat and or radio emissions?
This actually isn't true. The electrical grid, as wires, is about 95% efficient. However, the power plants aren't very efficient, ranging from 30% to 60%. This is because of the Carnot limits that impact the conversion of heat to work in a heat engine.
For example if we switched to Solar energy, we'd need to pave over Nevada with light-sensitive silicon. And that still wouldn't provide a way to fuel cars or freight trucks.
Nonsense. If we switched to solar PV, we'd need roughly 70,000 km^2 of panels. That's based on US energy consumption, taking in to account clouds, day/night, all the stuff solar deniers like to pretend is an issue. Now, 70,000 km^2 sounds like a lot, but it really is about 270 km on a side. Convert that to miles, get 165 miles on a side. Big, but not as big as Nevada. Expensive as hell, sure. But not too big.
Now of course, we could build those cells on our roofs, and cut that by a major number.
Fortunately nothing is actually built out of money.
Yep, it's made out of the work of people. If those people have even a basic education, money can exist in short order.
It isn't sinking in with the tech crowd here, but the United States is broke.
This is a japanese project, not a US project, but I'll pretend it is.
Oh yeah, tell me about the upcoming research on hot fusion, cold fusion, 80% efficient solar cells, giant ocean wave turbines, lava heat exchangers, induced micro-earthquakes, whatever. But, research is one thing and getting any of these sources able to surplant cheap oil is something else.
Clearly you've never read of what happens when oil really goes away. To do that, set your clock back to wartime in Europe. It wasn't that conservation, panic, or anything else. It was coal gasification city. Everything was powered by wood and coal. There is a hell of a lot of coal (now some people say it's peaked but that just ain't so). Coal can be converted into diesel, gas, plastic. If the Nazi's produced millions of gallons of aviation fuel from coal while their country was under attack by half the world, the United States can produce a lot more in peace time. In fact, 240,000 barrels a day are produced world wide, right here and now. However, coal is really just the start of this process - biomass goes in with no modification. If you have large quantities of hydrogen (which you have if you have a lot of electricity) and CO2 (which you can capture with a high school science experiment scaled up), you have the input of the process. So anything that produces electricity produces oil.
Now, you're probably saying, ooohhh that's a technological fix that can't work. Here's the issue. Every time we're about to run out of something, we find a technical fix. When we ran out of wood, we found coal. When we ran out of whale oil, we found ground oil. When we started to feel the first hits of oil depletion, we found natural gas. We also found nuclear but many people don't want to talk about that. Imagine our society today trying to run on whale oil. It just would not happen. You'd be lucky if you got a week of power out of whale oil.
There is no money to finance the huge capital expenditures needed to transform the energy systems from oil/coal to anything else. The banking system in the USA has imploded: and no one will talk about it.
The real US economy is in San Jose, where VC's are still funding, google is still booming, and green energy investment is everywhere. Those capital costs are falling fast. 9% a year for PV solar, for example. Even though the system blew up, all the people are still there, willing to put in their hours, all the iron is waiting to be mined and the copper to wrought in to wires. Now is a great time for the VC/Warren Buffet mentality to take over from the Chicago school/Wall Street trader mentality. And besides, can't the government just get into more debt :-p. Or maybe the Chinese will fund it.
Anyway, there aren't going to be any giant floating cities in the future. There isn't any money to actually build them.
Depressions like this one last for 10-20 years at most. I know there's talk of fundamental resource depletion, but this depression will be gone and we'll be back to 1998 again. Infact, I suspect green energy booms (from those technological fixes that are impossible) will be one of the things that gets us out of it. Then their will be a lot of money again, and we'll be building more than we can dream of now.
You want a glimpse of the real future? Visit Haiti. Corrupt, bankrupt, stupid, backward, crowded, loud, hopeless, and filled with lots of clueless rich people running around trying to help but doing nothing.
Actually, I don't need to visit Haiti to experience this, I just have to visit a big US city. While it may be fun for misanthrops to believe that humanities' future is bleak, history does not lend support to this prediction.
Several issues:
1. It's really CPU intensive.
2. Distortion. Web cams are not consistently made. While you can solve it, see 1.
3. Vibration and mounting. You'll really have to line up the web cams good, and you'll probably be doing that multiple times in short order.
Stereo's just one of those things where you want an ASIC to do the work, instead of a normal PC.
As I cyberunplugged my cyberelectric cybercar from my cybersolar cyberpanels, I cyberwatched a cybertrain cyberrun down the cyberrailroad cybertracks. I cybersaw a cybercriminal with a cyberski cybermask cyberwalk onto the cybertrain at the cyberstation and cyberpunch a cybermale cyberpassenger who cyberlooked in his cyber20's. Then he cyberstole some cybercash from the cyberpassenger and cyberran cyberaway, and I no longer cybersaw the cybercriminal.
-Cybersample cyberwitness cybertestimony ~2020.
Seriously, cyber is getting to be like the e- prefix.
We've got something to replace those technologies. Linux.