The tar sands are an ecological disaster and will probably only get worse. But they are still only a very small part of oil production. Truth is we don't yet need them and the amount currently extracted could easily be offset by improved efficiency.
LOL! At least you KNOW which Slashdot commenter actually made the statement. And you could dig through all my comments of the past several years to see whether I've changed opinions or contradicted myself. Which AC are you? Are you the Original Dumbass or just one of his asslickers?
I'm not defending coal or natgas. I'm pointing out the flaw in your binary statement - ie only coal or nuclear. There are other established options and no one option will do it for all. As a counter to your hybrid argument, we could go back to burning oil on a wider scale, which used to be far more common than coal prior to the 70s. We would still have to refine out the sulphur or treat the exhaust from burning oil but there would still be energy input savings from not having to refine all the way to gasoline (petrol). The gas-electric hybrids would have a tough time competing with those plants and with sufficient BEVs & V2G, you get benefits not obtainable with FF-only vehicles, much greater than what you'd get from hybrids and don't have the cost & complexity of 2 powertrains in a single vehicle.
"You think there's any difference between burning that in a plant outside of town and just burning it in your engine compartment?" Absolutely. In a plant, you'd install large (& expensive) FGD units that are capable of removing the emissions equivalent to hundreds of thousands of cars, perhaps millions. Doing it per vehicle with catalytic converters is nowhere near as effective or efficient, especially since the car emissions are particularly bad when just being started up but the converter is at low efficiency because of the warm-up period required.
Do you know why the catalytic converter was invented? Or why London banned the use of coal for heating in the city?
You want nukes? Go ahead but a "tried & tested" technology should be able to stand on its own 2 feet & not require the public to underwrite it or its inevitable cost overruns. I've been hearing about the promise of energy too cheap to meter for a long time and it's only been getting more expensive. Even France had to back off going 100% nuclear although their build-out was impressive. Wind & solar are presently dependent of FiTs & subsidies but that's quickly changing and grid parity has been reached in some places & will be almost universal within a decade.
This nonsense again? 1st off, the "30% eff." is pretty much the peak for gas vehicles, not the average or the median. It can get as low at 14%, if not lower for the really terrible ones. There are some factors you're not considering, or are deliberately ignoring while shilling for nukes.
If most of your vehicles are EVs, then you have much lower emissions in heavily populated areas, you know, where people live. If you're pushing your emissions back to the plants, you get huge efficiencies of scale for controlling them and you don't have as much smog-forming ground-level ozone where millions chose to work & play. And your vehicle fleet gets cleaner as you clean up the plants without having to wait for a turnover in automobile ownership. Coal's share of electricity generation is under 40% and falling so you have a good chance of living somewhere where's it's lower. You'll be shocked, SHOCKED to learn that nuclear & coal are NOT the only 2 options for electricity generation in America, despite their current relative dominance.
And many EV owners also have solar panels so there's another non-coal charging option.
Canada is a big, varied place. Ontario has been using very little coal for about 5 yrs, if memory serves. When has Quebec last relied on coal or any fossil fuel for electricity generation? Together those two are far & away the VAST majority of "Canada" and if it weren't for Alberta and its tar sands, they probably could have hit their Kyoto targets long ago.
Those subsidies apply to all BEVs, not just Tesla, which is a startup. You can get the same discount on a Leaf which is 1/2 - 1/3 the price of a Model S and is made by one of the biggest automakers in the world. And the "dirty coal" argument is a load of horseshit. Come out from behind your cloak of cowardly anonymity & we'll debate.
There are now 10X as many Americans running overseas for healthcare as there are coming in seeking same. The last numbers I can recall are 750,000 US citizens & residents practicising medical tourism. Since it's not likely that they're doing this to have a few hundred dollars, just think about how much money is leaving the US to be spent in foreign hospitals & clinics.
I completely agree. My health is still excellent although my finances are only now starting to improve after years of living paycheck to paycheck. On the other hand, I have several very well-to-do friends and former colleagues who've had some quite serious health issues. I wouldn't trade places for 10x what any of them are worth.
It's no longer about using a VPN bypass.
That was my original idea BEFORE I thought about a TrafficGen plugin for Netflix. This dummy traffic will come from Verizon customers back to Level3, There'll have to be some sophistication in the design of the plugin but nothing that is particularly difficult.
You keep mentioning that paying peering costs would be cheaper but without knowing what those costs are, how can you be sure? From what I've found, peering is charged by Mbps and for companies the size of Verizon & Level3, the price range appears to be $1 - 2.50 per Mbps.
Assuming that Verizon has 10 million customers accessing Netflix, that could be million$ per day.
Clarification: at this point I'm not talking about a VPN bypass, only about using a bytecounter / trafficgen plugin to balance the traffic from Netflix through Level3 So no VPN fees for either Netflix or their Verizon customers & no peering payments by Level3 to Verizon.
" Verizon sells a cloud solution that is excellent. Netflix could just host out of the Verizon cloud to serve Verizon customers" That's fine - if Verizon is & remains excellent. But they're essentially in a monopoly position in many markets and what recourse does Netflix have if Verizon decides to amp up the charges or their cloud service start sucking donkey balls?
"Our road system is maintained by the government to serve the common good. The internet is much more of a free market"
Not close enough to being free. Far too many people simply don't have the choice to change to providers when dissatisfied. I would like to see the last mile become a common good but other changes would be needed to ensure fairness.
"How would that help? If a packet is going to get from Level3 Oregon to say a Verizon home in Philadelphia it at some point is going to have to hit a peering location between Level3 and Verizon. Unless you add a bunch of other 3rd parties in there. In which case it is still going to have to happen indirectly. What is a VPN going to do to fix that?"
Colin Nederkoom used a VPN link to show that he could access Netflix at almost 10x the paltry 375 kbps he was getting on his Verizon 75 Mbps symmetric service. The underlying issue is that Verizon is muddying the waters by being both a residential ISP AND a Tier 1 provider. I don't know how it would EVER be possible to have nearly symmetric traffic with them when their small-customer base is in the millions as end-user traffic is HIGHLY asymmetric. There's a reason why i mentioned VyprVPN apart from them being the service used by Nederkoom to bypass Verizon's throttling - they have an online storage service as well so if customer's take advantage of this, it might help balance the traffic if Netflix acquires them.
But there's a much simpler solution that Netflix could implement - a bytecounter & traffic gen plugin that would send random data back when the user is connected to the streaming service and if they implement it unencrypted, they could have Level3 discard it silently as soon as it hits their network from the Verizon side.
Deal 3 - pay the Comcast / Verizon extortion for as short a time as possible while working on an alternate solution. For example, buy up or cut deals with as many top-tier, distributed VPN providers as possible; VyprVPN would be a good start. Cut deals with Google & Microsoft to deliver Netflix content on their infrastructure and distribute through as many peers as possible. Work with Google Fiber & municipalities to build hi-speed & wireless that bypasses the monopolies while media-blasting the customers of said monopolies about greater choice, performance & security and truly-free markets.
It's well within Level3's capability to spread the load among all the peers. Netflix is not a ISP, they're a content provider so it's wrong to strongarm them. Do owners of popular venues pay to upgrade the interstate 50 miles out of town?
By the way, Netflix HAS ALREADY PAID both Comcast & Verizon - http://www.theverge.com/2014/4... That was months ago. So the issue now is between Verizon & Level3.
Is Netflix going to have to pay extortion money to EVERY major provider in the world if their traffic causes asymmetric bandwidth between peers?
If it were up to me, I would tell Comcast & Verizon to go fuck themselves and start buying up every multihomed / distributed VPN service I could find and sell that as a premium service with some goodies to sweeten the pot for my customers. I'd start with VyprVPN, which is the one that was used by Colin Nederkoom to figure out that Verizon was throttling his Netflix traffic http://www.goldenfrog.com/vypr...
They very much are - as with Comcast, Netflix was forced to cut a deal with Verizon, which was done back in April or May. So requiring Level3 to pay as well is double-dipping
Looks like VPN services like VyprVPN will see some significant growth from Verizon's customers in the short term. While Verizon may want to strongarm Netflix into paying them directly, Level3 could reroute the traffic through other networks that also peer with Verizon since Netflix's traffic isn't at all latency sensitive
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The tar sands are an ecological disaster and will probably only get worse.
But they are still only a very small part of oil production. Truth is we don't yet need them and the amount currently extracted could easily be offset by improved efficiency.
Now which AC is that? Asslicker #1, #5 or a wannabe original fuckwad?
Are you smart enough to figure out who's posting this?
Can't afford one either.
Well, I'll have to content myself with watching Chris Harris put one through its paces in Malibu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'm surprised that the electric-only range on the i8 is so low given that it costs as much a Model S & Chevy Volt combined.
LOL! At least you KNOW which Slashdot commenter actually made the statement. And you could dig through all my comments of the past several years to see whether I've changed opinions or contradicted myself.
Which AC are you? Are you the Original Dumbass or just one of his asslickers?
I'm not defending coal or natgas. I'm pointing out the flaw in your binary statement - ie only coal or nuclear.
There are other established options and no one option will do it for all.
As a counter to your hybrid argument, we could go back to burning oil on a wider scale, which used to be far more common than coal prior to the 70s.
We would still have to refine out the sulphur or treat the exhaust from burning oil but there would still be energy input savings from not having to refine all the way to gasoline (petrol). The gas-electric hybrids would have a tough time competing with those plants and with sufficient BEVs & V2G, you get benefits not obtainable with FF-only vehicles, much greater than what you'd get from hybrids and don't have the cost & complexity of 2 powertrains in a single vehicle.
"You think there's any difference between burning that in a plant outside of town and just burning it in your engine compartment?"
Absolutely. In a plant, you'd install large (& expensive) FGD units that are capable of removing the emissions equivalent to hundreds of thousands of cars, perhaps millions. Doing it per vehicle with catalytic converters is nowhere near as effective or efficient, especially since the car emissions are particularly bad when just being started up but the converter is at low efficiency because of the warm-up period required.
Do you know why the catalytic converter was invented? Or why London banned the use of coal for heating in the city?
You want nukes? Go ahead but a "tried & tested" technology should be able to stand on its own 2 feet & not require the public to underwrite it or its inevitable cost overruns. I've been hearing about the promise of energy too cheap to meter for a long time and it's only been getting more expensive.
Even France had to back off going 100% nuclear although their build-out was impressive.
Wind & solar are presently dependent of FiTs & subsidies but that's quickly changing and grid parity has been reached in some places & will be almost universal within a decade.
This nonsense again?
1st off, the "30% eff." is pretty much the peak for gas vehicles, not the average or the median. It can get as low at 14%, if not lower for the really terrible ones.
There are some factors you're not considering, or are deliberately ignoring while shilling for nukes.
If most of your vehicles are EVs, then you have much lower emissions in heavily populated areas, you know, where people live.
If you're pushing your emissions back to the plants, you get huge efficiencies of scale for controlling them and you don't have as much smog-forming ground-level ozone where millions chose to work & play. And your vehicle fleet gets cleaner as you clean up the plants without having to wait for a turnover in automobile ownership.
Coal's share of electricity generation is under 40% and falling so you have a good chance of living somewhere where's it's lower.
You'll be shocked, SHOCKED to learn that nuclear & coal are NOT the only 2 options for electricity generation in America, despite their current relative dominance.
And many EV owners also have solar panels so there's another non-coal charging option.
Canada is a big, varied place. Ontario has been using very little coal for about 5 yrs, if memory serves.
When has Quebec last relied on coal or any fossil fuel for electricity generation?
Together those two are far & away the VAST majority of "Canada" and if it weren't for Alberta and its tar sands, they probably could have hit their Kyoto targets long ago.
Those subsidies apply to all BEVs, not just Tesla, which is a startup. You can get the same discount on a Leaf which is 1/2 - 1/3 the price of a Model S and is made by one of the biggest automakers in the world.
And the "dirty coal" argument is a load of horseshit. Come out from behind your cloak of cowardly anonymity & we'll debate.
There are now 10X as many Americans running overseas for healthcare as there are coming in seeking same. The last numbers I can recall are 750,000 US citizens & residents practicising medical tourism.
Since it's not likely that they're doing this to have a few hundred dollars, just think about how much money is leaving the US to be spent in foreign hospitals & clinics.
I completely agree. My health is still excellent although my finances are only now starting to improve after years of living paycheck to paycheck.
On the other hand, I have several very well-to-do friends and former colleagues who've had some quite serious health issues. I wouldn't trade places for 10x what any of them are worth.
The more I read about healthcare costs in America, the more I wonder why they didn't move to single-payer decades ago.
Because freedom is more important than health or so some people tell themselves.
If you want to truly see condenscension in action, you should watch Fox & Friends.
It's no longer about using a VPN bypass.
That was my original idea BEFORE I thought about a TrafficGen plugin for Netflix. This dummy traffic will come from Verizon customers back to Level3,
There'll have to be some sophistication in the design of the plugin but nothing that is particularly difficult.
You keep mentioning that paying peering costs would be cheaper but without knowing what those costs are, how can you be sure?
From what I've found, peering is charged by Mbps and for companies the size of Verizon & Level3, the price range appears to be $1 - 2.50 per Mbps.
Assuming that Verizon has 10 million customers accessing Netflix, that could be million$ per day.
Clarification: at this point I'm not talking about a VPN bypass, only about using a bytecounter / trafficgen plugin to balance the traffic from Netflix through Level3
So no VPN fees for either Netflix or their Verizon customers & no peering payments by Level3 to Verizon.
steaming, sauteing, or even poaching will keep them plump & juicy
"That would solve the peering problem but it would double Netflix's data usage. It would be far cheaper to pay for peering."
Double it's data usage where? On Level3? It's traffic to be discarded and this would prevent them from having to pay Verizon.
" Verizon sells a cloud solution that is excellent. Netflix could just host out of the Verizon cloud to serve Verizon customers"
That's fine - if Verizon is & remains excellent. But they're essentially in a monopoly position in many markets and what recourse does Netflix have if Verizon decides to amp up the charges or their cloud service start sucking donkey balls?
"Our road system is maintained by the government to serve the common good. The internet is much more of a free market"
Not close enough to being free. Far too many people simply don't have the choice to change to providers when dissatisfied.
I would like to see the last mile become a common good but other changes would be needed to ensure fairness.
"How would that help? If a packet is going to get from Level3 Oregon to say a Verizon home in Philadelphia it at some point is going to have to hit a peering location between Level3 and Verizon. Unless you add a bunch of other 3rd parties in there. In which case it is still going to have to happen indirectly. What is a VPN going to do to fix that?"
Colin Nederkoom used a VPN link to show that he could access Netflix at almost 10x the paltry 375 kbps he was getting on his Verizon 75 Mbps symmetric service.
The underlying issue is that Verizon is muddying the waters by being both a residential ISP AND a Tier 1 provider.
I don't know how it would EVER be possible to have nearly symmetric traffic with them when their small-customer base is in the millions as end-user traffic is HIGHLY asymmetric.
There's a reason why i mentioned VyprVPN apart from them being the service used by Nederkoom to bypass Verizon's throttling - they have an online storage service as well so if customer's take advantage of this, it might help balance the traffic if Netflix acquires them.
But there's a much simpler solution that Netflix could implement - a bytecounter & traffic gen plugin that would send random data back when the user is connected to the streaming service and if they implement it unencrypted, they could have Level3 discard it silently as soon as it hits their network from the Verizon side.
Deal 3 - pay the Comcast / Verizon extortion for as short a time as possible while working on an alternate solution.
For example, buy up or cut deals with as many top-tier, distributed VPN providers as possible; VyprVPN would be a good start.
Cut deals with Google & Microsoft to deliver Netflix content on their infrastructure and distribute through as many peers as possible.
Work with Google Fiber & municipalities to build hi-speed & wireless that bypasses the monopolies while media-blasting the customers of said monopolies about greater choice, performance & security and truly-free markets.
It's well within Level3's capability to spread the load among all the peers. Netflix is not a ISP, they're a content provider so it's wrong to strongarm them.
Do owners of popular venues pay to upgrade the interstate 50 miles out of town?
By the way, Netflix HAS ALREADY PAID both Comcast & Verizon - http://www.theverge.com/2014/4...
That was months ago. So the issue now is between Verizon & Level3.
Is Netflix going to have to pay extortion money to EVERY major provider in the world if their traffic causes asymmetric bandwidth between peers?
If it were up to me, I would tell Comcast & Verizon to go fuck themselves and start buying up every multihomed / distributed VPN service I could find and sell that as a premium service with some goodies to sweeten the pot for my customers.
I'd start with VyprVPN, which is the one that was used by Colin Nederkoom to figure out that Verizon was throttling his Netflix traffic
http://www.goldenfrog.com/vypr...
They very much are - as with Comcast, Netflix was forced to cut a deal with Verizon, which was done back in April or May.
So requiring Level3 to pay as well is double-dipping
Looks like VPN services like VyprVPN will see some significant growth from Verizon's customers in the short term.
While Verizon may want to strongarm Netflix into paying them directly, Level3 could reroute the traffic through other networks that also peer with Verizon since Netflix's traffic isn't at all latency sensitive
And yet they're still throttling Netflix?