If you're leasing the battery ( the hallmark of the Better Place plan ) then you wouldn't care - it's not your battery, not your warranty. If you get a bad one, you call it in, go back through the switch station ( or a different one) and that's it.
In the end, we want batteries to be a commodity; leasing them is probably the quickest route to that goal.
Agreed. You absolutely shouldn't ever buy one until it fits your personal circumstances.
But there are tens of millions who would be well served by EVs with 100 - 160 mile range.
No need for them to wait until you're satisfied.
I thought the whole point of the "global village" of manufacturing was to mitigate just these sorts of problems. Silly me. On a personal note, i was holding off on buying a really nice NAS as I was waiting for drives to hit my sweet pricing spot. On to Plan B-
Well those aren't exactly the same drive but I should have clarified - these are the same brand-name enterprise drives ( no change in model numbers or specs ) that we'd previously been quoted on. I'm not sure if new enterprise drives have risen by the same markup as consumer ones.
I like a good joke-in-song-lyrics as much as anyone but this was way off-base, not funny and you're trashing possibly the best song that the Wilson sisters ever wrote.
I've not been able to find worldwide energy usage projections looking forward 150 years but I'm skeptical that our consumption would grow so much in that time given that energy and its cost has been foremost in the minds of most of us for a long time.
Also, every longterm projection I've ever seen shows a population decline with a concomitant reduction in energy usage past 2050 and while energy use has been growing, so has energy productivity.
This Wikipedia article and accompanying graphic provides an estimate of 89 PETAwatts that reaches the surface of the Earth.
If we consider only the amount that strikes land, so approx 30%, that's 26PW which is ~1700x current usage. If we assume that we are never able to capture more than 5% of that, it's still 85x what we're using today.
"Contrary to his nature"? You're putting a limit on an infinite being. How do you suppose I could choose not to repond to divine intervention? Has it occurred to you that anything that God "knows" would be manifested?
And why are you limiting his knowledge to what is "currently happening"? If God is infinite and eternal, isn't it likely that he's not constrained by Time, as we are? So for him there is no past, present, and future but a single infinite present where all moments are one.
"Mull" is more subtle than consider and has a secondary meaning implying "to screw up" or "to fail".
And, since it's alliterative with Malaysia, it's a very appropriate use for this story's headline.
(Note: Reposting previous comment with better formatting)
When you really dig into the arguments, some of which have been thrown back and forth for a long time, you'll realize just how subtly difficult the problem is and should quickly find that the rebuttals depend on placing limits on a supposedly omnipotent / omniscient being.
I'll give a few quick examples with typical rebuttals.
Q: Can God make a stone so heavy he cannot move or lift it / Can God create something he cannot destroy?
A: That is illogical so it's not a valid question
Q: Can god destroy himself?
A: Why would he want to? / It's against his nature
Q: Who created God?
A: God is, by definition, uncreated
I don't know what you'll glean from the Q&A above but, with my twisted sense of humor, I derive that logic and definitions are more powerful than God.
When you really dig into the arguments, some of which have been thrown back and forth for a long time, you'll realize just how subtly difficult the problem is.
You'll quickly find that the rebuttals depend on placing limits on a supposedly omnipotent / omniscient being. I'll give a few quick examples with typical rebuttals.
Q: Can God make a stone so heavy he cannot move or lift it / Can God create something he cannot destroy?
A: That is illogical so it's not a valid question
Q: Can god destroy himself?
A: Why would he want to? / It's against his nature
Q: Who created God?
A: God is, by definition, uncreated
I don't know what you'll glean from the Q&A above but, with my twisted sense of humor, I derive that logic and definitions are more powerful than God.
I see on your page you're ruminating about free will and omnipotence. You're on the right track but you may have some terms wrong. The christian god is supposed to be both omniscient (all-knowing) and omnipotent (all-powerful) and human free will is incompatible with an omniscient being.
But the problem is worse than that - it's not our free will that's jeopardized, it's his own. God can't be omniscient, omnipotent and himself have free will.
You can reverse the system to provide cooling in the summer since the ground is much cooler than the air. There are plans to combine EGS with refinement of rare earths, while are widespread but quite diffuse in most places and modern plants already inject the fluids back into the ground.
I think a few plants are capturing the gases and the per MW/hr emissions are much lower than coal-fired, which also releases significant methane during processing.
I think the biggest worry would be instability caused by fracking; the other problems are manageable, but not trivial.
It's clear that geothermal alone isn't the answer but there's still considerable potential if the enhanced geothermal methods can be done safely.
Apart from electricity generation, there's the use of ground-sourced heat pumps and the source of most of that heat is solar radiation warming the top 30 feet.
Direct heating is way more efficient than geothermal electricity generation.
That was close to what I was originally going to tell him, although not as detailed, except I was ticked off that he was clearly trolling. Good post - perhaps I'll be a bit more restrained next time.
A decline is volume is a big factor but they've also been cutting staff over the years. But the payment they've been saddled with making into the pension fund is about the same or larger than their overall loss for the last few years.
I fully support residential mail delivery should dropping to 3 times per week - Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday is my suggestion. And a change in rates for letter mail is called for, perhaps dividing the country into zones and having asymmetric rates for rural areas.
Perhaps they could also diversify into other areas; after all the world's largest bank by deposits is the Japan Post Group.
Interesting but if we did more reprocessing, there would be a lot less need to mine coal and with lots more nuclear, we would have the energy to process the really dirty and difficult fossil fuels in way that didn't need as much water or release as much pollutants.
Even better would be the use of nuclear designs that didn't require as much water for cooling.
I've heard that the companies who make the fuel rods charge an exorbitant amount of money and the plant is locked into a contract. Might be one of the reasons the molten-salt / LFTR guys are so eager for thorium designs although I think they're being unrealistic about how long it'll take to be ready for commercial operation.
USPS has been adapting and has been downsizing both their overall workforce and their permanent full-timers for over 2 decades. The ONLY reason they're not profitable is the ridiculous requirement that they fully fund 75 years worth of pensions within 10 years of 2006.
"USPS employed 671,687 persons as of September 30, 2010 (FY2010). USPS’s workforce size has dropped by 171,576 employees (20.3%) in the past 20 years, and USPS had 40,395 (6.0%) fewer employees at the end of FY2010 than it did at the end of FY2009. Since 1990, the career/non-career composition of the USPS’s workforce has also changed. The number of career employees has declined 23.2%, and the number of non-career employees has increased 6.3%.
Facing financial problems, the USPS recently has instituted a hiring freeze, frozen the pay rate of managers, and offered some employees early retirement options. In FY2010, USPS operated with its smallest workforce in at least 20 years."
It's a bit disingenuous to suggest that I didn't read the statute and THEN ( okay, in the same message ) imply state that one cannot be literal about it.
But, I'll leave aside any argument about "letter vs spirit" of the law or concerning the initial engagement and focus on the truly disturbing incident which even several Iraq combat veterans says was unjustified - the firing on the van.
There a lot of bad things to say about the attitudes of the chopper gunners.
One of them, possible 2, were just itching to kill more people, especially the cameraman flopping around on the ground - "Come on buddy", "All you gotta do is pick up a weapon".
Even if he there was an RPG right next to him, what exactly did they think a half-dead man imitating a dying fish was going to accomplish with his only known target a mile away in the sky, with its guns trained on him?
But the request to shoot the van and the permission is what stumps me; it looks like the gunners mention only ONCE that the van might be picking up weapons along with bodies. That I don't see - from the video it looks like the focus is entirely on the wounded; so it's considered an act of war to rescue your own people after fighting?
I know there was fighting "in the neighborhood" but it wasn't anywhere near where this group was at, as evinced by the surprisingly nonchalant behavior of everyone at the beginning of the video and the length of time it took for soldiers in vehicles to arrive on the scene.
Also, I read that an officer said they were reluctant to move Bradleys into the area for fear of driving over bodies but it seems that happened anyway and the chopper soldiers certainly thought it was worth a chuckle.
I've done my share of dirty jobs, none that involved killing although I have had to deal with death; it seems that too many fighting men have yet to learn that some jobs are not meant to be treated as a game or enjoyed.
That's a manufacturing problem, not a problem of the energy source. How long would it take to replace the ~75 million barrels/day the world uses? We can't - that's why so much time and money has been poured into exploration.
For sunlight, despite the inefficiency at which we presently utilize it, it's only a matter of cloud cover and planetary rotation.
And good quality solar cells can last a long time and the mined materials can be recycled. It's quite common to find warranties for 90% output for the 1st 10 years followed by 80% output for the next 25 years.
Granted, that the initial mining is problematic, but worn out panels can be recycled. By esoteric, I assume you're referring to the CIGS ( Copper-indium-gallimum-selenide ) or the Cadmium-Telluride panels.but there are plenty made from good old silicon. If that's esoteric, then we have a bigger problem with PCs / tablets / smartphones / automotive microcontrollers.
Photovoltaic is still a nascent industry and I'm confident that real breakthroughs are still to come but not too far away - no more than 10 years to see very affordable, durable panels with 40-60% conversion efficiency.
I don't see Joe Public replacing his home-owned panels until something fantastically better comes along but if he's part of a solar leasing program where the panels are owned, installed and maintained by a utility, then the more efficient ones will be rotated in as soon as it makes financial sense.
The only hurdle then would be for proper recycling and disposal.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're leasing the battery ( the hallmark of the Better Place plan ) then you wouldn't care - it's not your battery, not your warranty. If you get a bad one, you call it in, go back through the switch station ( or a different one) and that's it. In the end, we want batteries to be a commodity; leasing them is probably the quickest route to that goal.
Google the following, please: battery switch, quickdrop, Renault Fluence EV, Better Place, Shai Agassi
Agreed. You absolutely shouldn't ever buy one until it fits your personal circumstances. But there are tens of millions who would be well served by EVs with 100 - 160 mile range. No need for them to wait until you're satisfied.
I thought the whole point of the "global village" of manufacturing was to mitigate just these sorts of problems. Silly me. On a personal note, i was holding off on buying a really nice NAS as I was waiting for drives to hit my sweet pricing spot. On to Plan B-
Well those aren't exactly the same drive but I should have clarified - these are the same brand-name enterprise drives ( no change in model numbers or specs ) that we'd previously been quoted on. I'm not sure if new enterprise drives have risen by the same markup as consumer ones.
Based on what I've been hearing from my suppliers, 50% above what the price was 6 mths ago is the new normal - for at least a year.
I like a good joke-in-song-lyrics as much as anyone but this was way off-base, not funny and you're trashing possibly the best song that the Wilson sisters ever wrote.
I've not been able to find worldwide energy usage projections looking forward 150 years but I'm skeptical that our consumption would grow so much in that time given that energy and its cost has been foremost in the minds of most of us for a long time. Also, every longterm projection I've ever seen shows a population decline with a concomitant reduction in energy usage past 2050 and while energy use has been growing, so has energy productivity. This Wikipedia article and accompanying graphic provides an estimate of 89 PETAwatts that reaches the surface of the Earth.
If we consider only the amount that strikes land, so approx 30%, that's 26PW which is ~1700x current usage. If we assume that we are never able to capture more than 5% of that, it's still 85x what we're using today.
"Contrary to his nature"? You're putting a limit on an infinite being. How do you suppose I could choose not to repond to divine intervention? Has it occurred to you that anything that God "knows" would be manifested? And why are you limiting his knowledge to what is "currently happening"? If God is infinite and eternal, isn't it likely that he's not constrained by Time, as we are? So for him there is no past, present, and future but a single infinite present where all moments are one.
"Mull" is more subtle than consider and has a secondary meaning implying "to screw up" or "to fail".
And, since it's alliterative with Malaysia, it's a very appropriate use for this story's headline.
(Note: Reposting previous comment with better formatting)
When you really dig into the arguments, some of which have been thrown back and forth for a long time, you'll realize just how subtly difficult the problem is and should quickly find that the rebuttals depend on placing limits on a supposedly omnipotent / omniscient being.
I'll give a few quick examples with typical rebuttals.
Q: Can God make a stone so heavy he cannot move or lift it / Can God create something he cannot destroy?
A: That is illogical so it's not a valid question
Q: Can god destroy himself?
A: Why would he want to? / It's against his nature
Q: Who created God?
A: God is, by definition, uncreated
I don't know what you'll glean from the Q&A above but, with my twisted sense of humor, I derive that logic and definitions are more powerful than God.
When you really dig into the arguments, some of which have been thrown back and forth for a long time, you'll realize just how subtly difficult the problem is.
You'll quickly find that the rebuttals depend on placing limits on a supposedly omnipotent / omniscient being. I'll give a few quick examples with typical rebuttals. Q: Can God make a stone so heavy he cannot move or lift it / Can God create something he cannot destroy? A: That is illogical so it's not a valid question Q: Can god destroy himself? A: Why would he want to? / It's against his nature Q: Who created God? A: God is, by definition, uncreated I don't know what you'll glean from the Q&A above but, with my twisted sense of humor, I derive that logic and definitions are more powerful than God.
I see on your page you're ruminating about free will and omnipotence. You're on the right track but you may have some terms wrong. The christian god is supposed to be both omniscient (all-knowing) and omnipotent (all-powerful) and human free will is incompatible with an omniscient being.
But the problem is worse than that - it's not our free will that's jeopardized, it's his own. God can't be omniscient, omnipotent and himself have free will.
Nope, that the ASUS warehouse inventory program but it's properly written Eeegrep.
You can reverse the system to provide cooling in the summer since the ground is much cooler than the air. There are plans to combine EGS with refinement of rare earths, while are widespread but quite diffuse in most places and modern plants already inject the fluids back into the ground. I think a few plants are capturing the gases and the per MW/hr emissions are much lower than coal-fired, which also releases significant methane during processing. I think the biggest worry would be instability caused by fracking; the other problems are manageable, but not trivial.
It's clear that geothermal alone isn't the answer but there's still considerable potential if the enhanced geothermal methods can be done safely.
Apart from electricity generation, there's the use of ground-sourced heat pumps and the source of most of that heat is solar radiation warming the top 30 feet.
Direct heating is way more efficient than geothermal electricity generation.
That's true of America and a lot of the world, perhaps but India, France, China and Japan never really stopped building new plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors
That was close to what I was originally going to tell him, although not as detailed, except I was ticked off that he was clearly trolling. Good post - perhaps I'll be a bit more restrained next time.
A decline is volume is a big factor but they've also been cutting staff over the years. But the payment they've been saddled with making into the pension fund is about the same or larger than their overall loss for the last few years.
I fully support residential mail delivery should dropping to 3 times per week - Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday is my suggestion. And a change in rates for letter mail is called for, perhaps dividing the country into zones and having asymmetric rates for rural areas. Perhaps they could also diversify into other areas; after all the world's largest bank by deposits is the Japan Post Group.
Interesting but if we did more reprocessing, there would be a lot less need to mine coal and with lots more nuclear, we would have the energy to process the really dirty and difficult fossil fuels in way that didn't need as much water or release as much pollutants.
Even better would be the use of nuclear designs that didn't require as much water for cooling.
I've heard that the companies who make the fuel rods charge an exorbitant amount of money and the plant is locked into a contract. Might be one of the reasons the molten-salt / LFTR guys are so eager for thorium designs although I think they're being unrealistic about how long it'll take to be ready for commercial operation.
USPS has been adapting and has been downsizing both their overall workforce and their permanent full-timers for over 2 decades. The ONLY reason they're not profitable is the ridiculous requirement that they fully fund 75 years worth of pensions within 10 years of 2006.
From http://fulltextreports.com/2011/05/31/crs-u-s-postal-service-workforce-size-and-employment-categories-1990-2010/
"USPS employed 671,687 persons as of September 30, 2010 (FY2010). USPS’s workforce size has dropped by 171,576 employees (20.3%) in the past 20 years, and USPS had 40,395 (6.0%) fewer employees at the end of FY2010 than it did at the end of FY2009. Since 1990, the career/non-career composition of the USPS’s workforce has also changed. The number of career employees has declined 23.2%, and the number of non-career employees has increased 6.3%.
Facing financial problems, the USPS recently has instituted a hiring freeze, frozen the pay rate of managers, and offered some employees early retirement options. In FY2010, USPS operated with its smallest workforce in at least 20 years."
It's a bit disingenuous to suggest that I didn't read the statute and THEN ( okay, in the same message ) imply state that one cannot be literal about it. But, I'll leave aside any argument about "letter vs spirit" of the law or concerning the initial engagement and focus on the truly disturbing incident which even several Iraq combat veterans says was unjustified - the firing on the van. There a lot of bad things to say about the attitudes of the chopper gunners. One of them, possible 2, were just itching to kill more people, especially the cameraman flopping around on the ground - "Come on buddy", "All you gotta do is pick up a weapon". Even if he there was an RPG right next to him, what exactly did they think a half-dead man imitating a dying fish was going to accomplish with his only known target a mile away in the sky, with its guns trained on him? But the request to shoot the van and the permission is what stumps me; it looks like the gunners mention only ONCE that the van might be picking up weapons along with bodies. That I don't see - from the video it looks like the focus is entirely on the wounded; so it's considered an act of war to rescue your own people after fighting? I know there was fighting "in the neighborhood" but it wasn't anywhere near where this group was at, as evinced by the surprisingly nonchalant behavior of everyone at the beginning of the video and the length of time it took for soldiers in vehicles to arrive on the scene. Also, I read that an officer said they were reluctant to move Bradleys into the area for fear of driving over bodies but it seems that happened anyway and the chopper soldiers certainly thought it was worth a chuckle. I've done my share of dirty jobs, none that involved killing although I have had to deal with death; it seems that too many fighting men have yet to learn that some jobs are not meant to be treated as a game or enjoyed.
That's a manufacturing problem, not a problem of the energy source. How long would it take to replace the ~75 million barrels/day the world uses? We can't - that's why so much time and money has been poured into exploration. For sunlight, despite the inefficiency at which we presently utilize it, it's only a matter of cloud cover and planetary rotation. And good quality solar cells can last a long time and the mined materials can be recycled. It's quite common to find warranties for 90% output for the 1st 10 years followed by 80% output for the next 25 years.
Granted, that the initial mining is problematic, but worn out panels can be recycled. By esoteric, I assume you're referring to the CIGS ( Copper-indium-gallimum-selenide ) or the Cadmium-Telluride panels.but there are plenty made from good old silicon. If that's esoteric, then we have a bigger problem with PCs / tablets / smartphones / automotive microcontrollers. Photovoltaic is still a nascent industry and I'm confident that real breakthroughs are still to come but not too far away - no more than 10 years to see very affordable, durable panels with 40-60% conversion efficiency. I don't see Joe Public replacing his home-owned panels until something fantastically better comes along but if he's part of a solar leasing program where the panels are owned, installed and maintained by a utility, then the more efficient ones will be rotated in as soon as it makes financial sense. The only hurdle then would be for proper recycling and disposal.
I was about to write a reasoned response but then I realized you're an idiot. Is there enough in your piggy bank to buy yourself a clue?