Non-plug-in hybrids no longer get any subsidy from the US government. The price of a Prius, Insight, etc. reflects the price at which the car maker is willing to sell it. It may, however, get some cross-subsidy from other models sold by the carmaker because the company has an incentive to sell hybrids to help meet corporate fuel economy standards.
The 5MHz analog bandwidth does seem artificially limited for a device with 100MHz sampling. Perhaps somebody has figured out how to hack it. But it's also a logic analyzer and a digital signal generator. And it uses 14 bit DACs so it offers a lot more measurement resolution than the cheap 8 bit scope interfaces do.
Sadly, the $100 price only applies if you are a student in the US who is taking a class where it is a required purchase. It's $160 for other students and $240 for the general public. It looks worthwhile if you get it for $100, more questionable otherwise.
To take full advantage of the capabilities of the Red Pitaya you need to put it in a shielded box and to power it with something cleaner than a USB tablet charger. The spurs that you are seeing are probably noise from the power supply or from the local RF environment. When I run a casual test on the spectrum analyzer on my Red Pitaya (sitting on the bench in the open and powered by a USB charger) I can see discernable peaks that correspond to the carrier frequencies of local AM broadcast stations with nothing at all connected to the inputs. The stations are not in my back yard; they are 5 to 20 miles away.
In any case, a device that sells for about $500 is way out of the league of the OP. And to use it as an oscilloscope you would also need to build an input buffer and attenuator. And buy probes and SMA adapters.
A sound card oscilloscope will have a very limited measurement range; exactly how limited depends on the sample rate of your sound card. At best you'll get a bandwidth of 90KHz or thereabouts if you have a card that does 192KHz sampling and if the analog bandwidth of the interface actually goes that high. But it's free if the signals you want to measure are suitable for direct connection to a sound card, or cheap if you also need to build the interface, and good enough for some purposes.
Reasonably inexpensive PC oscilloscope interfaces with 20MHz bandwidth are available now. Here are links to two: they're a slight stretch from the OP's price point ($80 and $73). If you're willing to spend more you can get more bandwidth; see the comparison table on the page for the SainSmart scope.
http://www.amazon.com/Hantek-6022BE-PC-based-Oscilloscope-Bandwidth/dp/B00EY10OSE/
http://www.amazon.com/SainSmart-Portable-Handheld-Oscilloscope-Bandwidth/dp/B00FYGEFYM/
We are well past the tipping point. The major chains are 100% digital now, and in most cases have removed their film projectors. Most independent theaters have also installed digital though they tend to keep their film equipment. Even revival houses are having difficulty getting film prints and have had to resort to showing DVD or Blu-Ray instead.
If a movie is shot on film, the grain from the shooting emulsion is captured by the scanning process and shows in digital projection. You won't see grain from the film print but you generally don't in any case; the grain of the print stock is much finer than the grain of the filming stock so the latter is mostly what you see. If the movie was edited on film (often they are not; nowadays even movies that are shot on film are likely to be scanned into a computer and edited digitally) the editing splices will also show. Seeing those things does not necessarily mean that you are seeing film projection.
People are only looking at the first generation Glass. What they are missing in the debate is that eventually this technology will be ubiquitous, and will be visually indistinguishable from ordinary eyeglasses. The genie is out of the bottle; we as a society just have to learn how to deal with the existence of this technology, not launch a misguided and doomed attempt to ban it.
The Titan Z is also overpriced in that it costs significantly more money than TWO Titan Black cards. It really only makes sense if you're planning to buy two of them for quad SLI, and if you've got that kind of crazy money to spend you don't care what it costs. The Titan Z is a statement product meant for people with too much disposable income; it doesn't make much sense for anybody else.
Once more, a movie theater chain takes an action that makes people think they are cracking down on piracy. That's also the real reason they ban texting during the movie; the audience distraction thing is a smokescreen.
But very little video piracy is done by going into theaters and recording the movie with a camera, and those bad recordings probably have little effect on the box office or on sale of legitimate videos in any case.. Most of it is inside jobs where somebody gets access to the movie server and rips the film from there.
You can get phones that cover all the bands used for HSPA+ worldwide. That's not quite 4G, despite the marketing of AT&T and T-Mobile, but it's still plenty fast: theoretical download speeds of 42Mbps and real world speeds reaching 10Mbps. Phones that offer that include the Nexus line, the Sony Xperia phones, the iPhone 4 and 5 families, and many others.
What you can't get are phones that cover all the bands used for LTE worldwide. Phones that offer worldwide HSPA+ and some LTE typically come in two versions: one for North America (with some, but not complete, coverage of bands used elsewhere) and one for the rest of the world (with limited coverage of the US LTE bands). One big sticking point is one of the LTE bands used by Verizon; since pretty much nobody else in the entire world uses it (Verizon bought the rights to it for the entire US, there are not yet any deployments on those frequencies elsewhere in the Americas, and it's not available for cell phone use in the rest of the world), nothing but a Verizon-specific phone will do.
If you have an unlocked phone with worldwide HSPA+, take it with you on your travels. Most likely the data speeds will be good enough. If they're not you'll have to think about getting a local phone, or perhaps consider getting a local phone-WiFi gateway instead.
The Iridium satellites do not offer high speed internet access. They were designed for very low data rate phone calls (they use AMBE encoding at 2.4Kbps) and SMS. They also offer data services but they operate at the same 2.4Kbps speed as voice. Globalstar does slightly better at 9.6Kbps.
Currently in the US, the best satellite internet service available is through the current generation of EchoStar geostationary satellites. Those offer speeds up to 15Mbps but suffer from the long latency that is inherent to geostationary orbit; packets have to travel at least 45,000 miles to go from Earth to satellite and back. HughesNet, WildBlue, and dishNET are all selling service on those satellites.
O3b Networks is currently in the process of deploying eight middle-Earth-orbit (8,000km, about 5,000 miles) satellites for Internet service; four are already in orbit and four more are scheduled to launch in July. Their main focus is on serving parts of the world with little or no internet access (the name is derived from "other 3 billion), and they offer their services primarily to local ISPs, not directly to consumers. I believe the cost of the earth equipment is too high for individuals though it might be acceptable for corporations. They claim to be planning to offer speeds up to 1.6Gbps. No price information is publicly listed.
Teledesic was a planned competitor to Iridium that never got off the ground (grin).
The Google satellite system will be useful if it happens and if the pricing is acceptable. Unlike O3B, I believe they plan to offer service directly to individuals; the low-earth-orbit satellites they plan to use should require less costly ground equipment.
Ways that Windows 8 is an improvement on Windows 7 include boot time and memory usage. There are also some other nice touches, like being able to mount ISO files without the need for any extra software.
Besides the interface, another big negative for some users is the removal of Windows Media Center from the basic package. The $10 upgrade from Win 8 Pro is OK; if it were $10 to add Media Center to any edition of Windows 8 I could live with that. But to add Media Center to the standard version of Windows 8 you have to buy the Pro Pack, an upgrade that costs $100. (The Pro Pack upgrade includes the other Win 8 Pro features like Bitlocker and domain logon, as well as Media Center, but few home users have any interest in those.) Microsoft has killed the home theater PC market with that boneheaded move.
Many monitors also have sound capability. It's usually even worse than the sound on TVs. But it typically only gets used in office situations where you just want sound so you can hear the warning beeps and the like from your OS; anybody who cares even the least little bit about sound quality will use separate speakers.
We need more information before we can actually draw conclusions from this study.
First, what energy consumption are the tallying up for the DVD? Manufacturing the physical disc, making the packaging, shipping the DVD package various places until it finds its way to a customer, all of those matter. If the disc is rented, we also have energy consumption of the rental store or Redbox, shipping if it's ordered from Netflix, and energy consumed traveling to the rental location if you make a special trip to get there.
What is the use case? Will the disc be bought and watched once? Will it be bought and watched a hundred times like that copy of Frozen that you got for the kids? Will it be rented, and from where? A Redbox in a location that the renter already visits regularly is the best case, a video store that the renter makes a special driving trip to reach is the worst, and discs by mail from Netflix lie somewhere in between as they make only a small incremental contribution to postal trips that are already being made.
The playing over and over case is one where the edge probably lies with the DVD. In most cases the disc will be played in a standalone DVD player. On average those consume less power than a computer does, but it's also possible that the streamed video will be viewed using a DVD or Blu-Ray player or with a set-top box such as a Roku, which might shift the advantage toward streaming. For the streamed video, we also have to add the power used by the server at Netflix or Amazon or wherever, or at their caching company such as Akamai, and the power used by all the internet infrastructure between the cloud and the viewer.
Except that they can't stop it. DVD ripping programs are legal almost everywhere other than the US, so they are readily available online from other countries. The US has no plans to put up a Great Firewall, so there is no way to prevent US residents from downloading those rippers from offshore sites.
Even if Netflix gets DVDs through some kind of cooperative arrangement, the first sale doctrine sets a ceiling on what the studios can ask for. If the studio doesn't offer a good enough deal, Netflix can go out and buy discs through normal channels and rent those. There is no similar ceiling on what the studios can request for streaming rights. That's one reason why the studios want to move away from physical discs, and possibly the reason we haven't yet seen Blu-Ray 4K; they don't want to be saddled with the first sale doctrine and its constraints.
The question is whether Netflix could buy discs through normal channels and then stream them (limited by the number of physical discs they own, one stream per disc) without the need for any special agreements. I don't think there have been any definitive court decisions on that question. The catch is that they might have to use the physical discs and dedicate one DVD drive to each, because rips of DVDs cannot currently be legally made in the US; that would make the service prohibitively expensive to offer.
In the early days of EPA testing, some car companies put special oil in the cars to improve the mileage ratings. Then somebody said "if this special oil works, why not market it to everybody?" They did, and the result was that everybody's gas mileage improved by 2-5%; just about all the motor oil you can buy now has mileage-enhancing additives.
Europeans are also offered more fuel efficient cars to buy. Many car models offer a variety of engine options elsewhere, but only the largest one is sold in the US. And companies make smaller car models that are sold elsewhere but not in the US.
VW is a good example; compare the range of offerings on the US site of www.vw.com to the ones on www.volkswagen.de or www.volkswagen.co.uk to see the contrast. The smallest car they sell in the US is the Golf but there are two smaller models, the up! and the Polo, that you can get in Europe. In the UK the Jetta is offered with either a 1.4L gas engine or a 1.6L TDI, but in the US the choices are 2.0L gas and 2.0L TDI. (I didn't compare the Golf because that car is currently about to replaced with an updated one in the US and info on the new version is not yet available on vw.com.) On the other hand, the Jetta Hybrid (1.4L gas engine plus electric boost) is offered in the US (and Germany, of course) but not in the UK.
In the short term, no. Driverless cars at the current state of the art aren't ready to turn loose on roads without a qualified human driver on hand.
In the long term, yes. Driverless cars will become reliable and will eventually be the norm. We're also likely to see roads that incorporate computer guidance; on those roads driverless cars will be mandatory, as human drivers will be unable to use the automatic guidance and would endanger the automatically controlled cars. Eventually driving a car will become something that only a minority of people bother to learn; it will be most common in rural areas where people have to learn how to drive farm machinery.
A good edit will improve a book. A bad edit can damage it beyond recognition, and it's all too common for publishers to impose a bad one though Stross does not seem to have suffered that indignity.
I'd like to see Microsoft abandon RT on tablets and introduce a Surface 3 using a Bay Trail processor. (They can continue with ARM for Windows Phone.) Microsoft's potential unique selling proposition for the Surface is compatibility with existing Windows software; RT can't deliver that. The package could be similar to the Surface 2, which is a nicely built device and would sell decently if it had full Windows capability. The use cases for the less expensive tablet will be more consumption-oriented, so staying with the 16:9 display rather than going with the higher resolution display of the Surface Pro 3 would be fine for its niche.
People use Bluetooth keyboards with tablets all the time. You can get iPad cases that include Bluetooth keyboards.
Speakers are another popular Bluetooth device to use with tablets. The internal speakers of most tablets aren't enough if you want to play music for a group.
I can imagine using a Bluetooth headset with Skype or Google Hangouts to make phone calls with a tablet, but I haven't seen anybody do that.
Could well be. That's a big difference between the way Mac OS works and the way that Windows and Linux work. On Mac OS you have to explicitly quit an application to make it go away. On Windows and Linux most applications close when you close their last window. There are a few exceptions. Spotify and Skype have to be explicitly shut down, which you do somewhat unintuitively by right clicking on their taskbar icons and using the popup menu. OpenOffice and LibreOffice don't shut down if you have the Quickstarter enabled. Recent versions of Chrome stay running if you have "continue running background apps when Chrome is closed" enabled and don't free memory.
iOS and Android both work like the Mac does; apps stay in RAM unless you force them to quit. I believe that Metro/Modern apps on Windows 8 also do; it's rather difficult to get those to actually shut down unless you are using ModernMix.
Just because other designs aren't purpose-built as EVs doesn't mean that they can't be successful designs. The Smart electric drive, for example, is well done, and it's really the car that the Smart should have been all along - for the typical use case of a Smart it makes a lot more sense than the gas powered version ever did, and it's a lot more fun to drive because it doesn't have that horribly clunky automatic manual transmission. The gas version isn't enough cheaper or enough cheaper to run than a low-end gasoline car such as a Honda Fit and it's a lot less versatile, so unless parking in urban areas is a big consideration or you're using it a form of mobile corporate advertising the original Smart isn't very smart. Speaking of the Fit, there is also an EV version of that car now.
Electric-only designs: besides the Leaf there is also the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, a car that almost nobody has heard of because of Mitsubishi's inept marketing in the US. It's bigger than the Smart - about the size of a Mini Cooper or Fiat 500 - and ridiculously cheap for an EV right now (around $16,000 after the tax credit). But its 62 mile range (as estimated by the EPA; other methods yield a larger number) means it's also pretty much strictly an urban car.
As for the fate of Ovonics, no generalizations can be made from the fate of those companies. Stanford Ovshinsky was something of a lone wolf inventor who came up with ideas long before their time. Way back in the 70s and 80s his Ovonics company tried to commercialize phase change memory; the semiconductor fabrication technology of the day was not up to the task. (This was long before flash memory became a thing, let alone the current attempts to commercialize phase change memory.) His next company, Energy Conversion Devices, was a maker of both flexible solar panels and NiMh batteries; Ovonics batteries were used in the GM EV-1. Both product lines fell victim to larger economies of scale and lower manufacturing costs in Asia (the battery line was also hurt by the technology transition to LiIon) and the fact that Ovshinsky was far more talented as an inventor than as a manager.
They have been doing a great job of building luxury cars. I see no reason for Tesla to exit that business.
Whether they can compete in the market for more affordable cars remains to be seen. They might well do better as a supplier of batteries for the next generation of Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt and Spark, Smart Electric Drive, and so on.
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Non-plug-in hybrids no longer get any subsidy from the US government. The price of a Prius, Insight, etc. reflects the price at which the car maker is willing to sell it. It may, however, get some cross-subsidy from other models sold by the carmaker because the company has an incentive to sell hybrids to help meet corporate fuel economy standards.
The 5MHz analog bandwidth does seem artificially limited for a device with 100MHz sampling. Perhaps somebody has figured out how to hack it. But it's also a logic analyzer and a digital signal generator. And it uses 14 bit DACs so it offers a lot more measurement resolution than the cheap 8 bit scope interfaces do.
Sadly, the $100 price only applies if you are a student in the US who is taking a class where it is a required purchase. It's $160 for other students and $240 for the general public. It looks worthwhile if you get it for $100, more questionable otherwise.
To take full advantage of the capabilities of the Red Pitaya you need to put it in a shielded box and to power it with something cleaner than a USB tablet charger. The spurs that you are seeing are probably noise from the power supply or from the local RF environment. When I run a casual test on the spectrum analyzer on my Red Pitaya (sitting on the bench in the open and powered by a USB charger) I can see discernable peaks that correspond to the carrier frequencies of local AM broadcast stations with nothing at all connected to the inputs. The stations are not in my back yard; they are 5 to 20 miles away.
In any case, a device that sells for about $500 is way out of the league of the OP. And to use it as an oscilloscope you would also need to build an input buffer and attenuator. And buy probes and SMA adapters.
A sound card oscilloscope will have a very limited measurement range; exactly how limited depends on the sample rate of your sound card. At best you'll get a bandwidth of 90KHz or thereabouts if you have a card that does 192KHz sampling and if the analog bandwidth of the interface actually goes that high. But it's free if the signals you want to measure are suitable for direct connection to a sound card, or cheap if you also need to build the interface, and good enough for some purposes.
Reasonably inexpensive PC oscilloscope interfaces with 20MHz bandwidth are available now. Here are links to two: they're a slight stretch from the OP's price point ($80 and $73). If you're willing to spend more you can get more bandwidth; see the comparison table on the page for the SainSmart scope.
http://www.amazon.com/Hantek-6022BE-PC-based-Oscilloscope-Bandwidth/dp/B00EY10OSE/
http://www.amazon.com/SainSmart-Portable-Handheld-Oscilloscope-Bandwidth/dp/B00FYGEFYM/
We are well past the tipping point. The major chains are 100% digital now, and in most cases have removed their film projectors. Most independent theaters have also installed digital though they tend to keep their film equipment. Even revival houses are having difficulty getting film prints and have had to resort to showing DVD or Blu-Ray instead.
If a movie is shot on film, the grain from the shooting emulsion is captured by the scanning process and shows in digital projection. You won't see grain from the film print but you generally don't in any case; the grain of the print stock is much finer than the grain of the filming stock so the latter is mostly what you see. If the movie was edited on film (often they are not; nowadays even movies that are shot on film are likely to be scanned into a computer and edited digitally) the editing splices will also show. Seeing those things does not necessarily mean that you are seeing film projection.
A story about the switch from a couple of years ago: http://www.hollywoodreporter.c...
A recent story about the conversion at some small theaters: http://www.wirenh.com/2013/11/...
Yes, the other patrons are.
People are only looking at the first generation Glass. What they are missing in the debate is that eventually this technology will be ubiquitous, and will be visually indistinguishable from ordinary eyeglasses. The genie is out of the bottle; we as a society just have to learn how to deal with the existence of this technology, not launch a misguided and doomed attempt to ban it.
The Titan Z is also overpriced in that it costs significantly more money than TWO Titan Black cards. It really only makes sense if you're planning to buy two of them for quad SLI, and if you've got that kind of crazy money to spend you don't care what it costs. The Titan Z is a statement product meant for people with too much disposable income; it doesn't make much sense for anybody else.
Once more, a movie theater chain takes an action that makes people think they are cracking down on piracy. That's also the real reason they ban texting during the movie; the audience distraction thing is a smokescreen.
But very little video piracy is done by going into theaters and recording the movie with a camera, and those bad recordings probably have little effect on the box office or on sale of legitimate videos in any case.. Most of it is inside jobs where somebody gets access to the movie server and rips the film from there.
You can get phones that cover all the bands used for HSPA+ worldwide. That's not quite 4G, despite the marketing of AT&T and T-Mobile, but it's still plenty fast: theoretical download speeds of 42Mbps and real world speeds reaching 10Mbps. Phones that offer that include the Nexus line, the Sony Xperia phones, the iPhone 4 and 5 families, and many others.
What you can't get are phones that cover all the bands used for LTE worldwide. Phones that offer worldwide HSPA+ and some LTE typically come in two versions: one for North America (with some, but not complete, coverage of bands used elsewhere) and one for the rest of the world (with limited coverage of the US LTE bands). One big sticking point is one of the LTE bands used by Verizon; since pretty much nobody else in the entire world uses it (Verizon bought the rights to it for the entire US, there are not yet any deployments on those frequencies elsewhere in the Americas, and it's not available for cell phone use in the rest of the world), nothing but a Verizon-specific phone will do.
If you have an unlocked phone with worldwide HSPA+, take it with you on your travels. Most likely the data speeds will be good enough. If they're not you'll have to think about getting a local phone, or perhaps consider getting a local phone-WiFi gateway instead.
The Iridium satellites do not offer high speed internet access. They were designed for very low data rate phone calls (they use AMBE encoding at 2.4Kbps) and SMS. They also offer data services but they operate at the same 2.4Kbps speed as voice. Globalstar does slightly better at 9.6Kbps.
Currently in the US, the best satellite internet service available is through the current generation of EchoStar geostationary satellites. Those offer speeds up to 15Mbps but suffer from the long latency that is inherent to geostationary orbit; packets have to travel at least 45,000 miles to go from Earth to satellite and back. HughesNet, WildBlue, and dishNET are all selling service on those satellites.
O3b Networks is currently in the process of deploying eight middle-Earth-orbit (8,000km, about 5,000 miles) satellites for Internet service; four are already in orbit and four more are scheduled to launch in July. Their main focus is on serving parts of the world with little or no internet access (the name is derived from "other 3 billion), and they offer their services primarily to local ISPs, not directly to consumers. I believe the cost of the earth equipment is too high for individuals though it might be acceptable for corporations. They claim to be planning to offer speeds up to 1.6Gbps. No price information is publicly listed.
Teledesic was a planned competitor to Iridium that never got off the ground (grin).
The Google satellite system will be useful if it happens and if the pricing is acceptable. Unlike O3B, I believe they plan to offer service directly to individuals; the low-earth-orbit satellites they plan to use should require less costly ground equipment.
Ways that Windows 8 is an improvement on Windows 7 include boot time and memory usage. There are also some other nice touches, like being able to mount ISO files without the need for any extra software.
Besides the interface, another big negative for some users is the removal of Windows Media Center from the basic package. The $10 upgrade from Win 8 Pro is OK; if it were $10 to add Media Center to any edition of Windows 8 I could live with that. But to add Media Center to the standard version of Windows 8 you have to buy the Pro Pack, an upgrade that costs $100. (The Pro Pack upgrade includes the other Win 8 Pro features like Bitlocker and domain logon, as well as Media Center, but few home users have any interest in those.) Microsoft has killed the home theater PC market with that boneheaded move.
Many monitors also have sound capability. It's usually even worse than the sound on TVs. But it typically only gets used in office situations where you just want sound so you can hear the warning beeps and the like from your OS; anybody who cares even the least little bit about sound quality will use separate speakers.
We need more information before we can actually draw conclusions from this study.
First, what energy consumption are the tallying up for the DVD? Manufacturing the physical disc, making the packaging, shipping the DVD package various places until it finds its way to a customer, all of those matter. If the disc is rented, we also have energy consumption of the rental store or Redbox, shipping if it's ordered from Netflix, and energy consumed traveling to the rental location if you make a special trip to get there.
What is the use case? Will the disc be bought and watched once? Will it be bought and watched a hundred times like that copy of Frozen that you got for the kids? Will it be rented, and from where? A Redbox in a location that the renter already visits regularly is the best case, a video store that the renter makes a special driving trip to reach is the worst, and discs by mail from Netflix lie somewhere in between as they make only a small incremental contribution to postal trips that are already being made.
The playing over and over case is one where the edge probably lies with the DVD. In most cases the disc will be played in a standalone DVD player. On average those consume less power than a computer does, but it's also possible that the streamed video will be viewed using a DVD or Blu-Ray player or with a set-top box such as a Roku, which might shift the advantage toward streaming. For the streamed video, we also have to add the power used by the server at Netflix or Amazon or wherever, or at their caching company such as Akamai, and the power used by all the internet infrastructure between the cloud and the viewer.
Except that they can't stop it. DVD ripping programs are legal almost everywhere other than the US, so they are readily available online from other countries. The US has no plans to put up a Great Firewall, so there is no way to prevent US residents from downloading those rippers from offshore sites.
Even if Netflix gets DVDs through some kind of cooperative arrangement, the first sale doctrine sets a ceiling on what the studios can ask for. If the studio doesn't offer a good enough deal, Netflix can go out and buy discs through normal channels and rent those. There is no similar ceiling on what the studios can request for streaming rights. That's one reason why the studios want to move away from physical discs, and possibly the reason we haven't yet seen Blu-Ray 4K; they don't want to be saddled with the first sale doctrine and its constraints.
The question is whether Netflix could buy discs through normal channels and then stream them (limited by the number of physical discs they own, one stream per disc) without the need for any special agreements. I don't think there have been any definitive court decisions on that question. The catch is that they might have to use the physical discs and dedicate one DVD drive to each, because rips of DVDs cannot currently be legally made in the US; that would make the service prohibitively expensive to offer.
In the early days of EPA testing, some car companies put special oil in the cars to improve the mileage ratings. Then somebody said "if this special oil works, why not market it to everybody?" They did, and the result was that everybody's gas mileage improved by 2-5%; just about all the motor oil you can buy now has mileage-enhancing additives.
Europeans are also offered more fuel efficient cars to buy. Many car models offer a variety of engine options elsewhere, but only the largest one is sold in the US. And companies make smaller car models that are sold elsewhere but not in the US.
VW is a good example; compare the range of offerings on the US site of www.vw.com to the ones on www.volkswagen.de or www.volkswagen.co.uk to see the contrast. The smallest car they sell in the US is the Golf but there are two smaller models, the up! and the Polo, that you can get in Europe. In the UK the Jetta is offered with either a 1.4L gas engine or a 1.6L TDI, but in the US the choices are 2.0L gas and 2.0L TDI. (I didn't compare the Golf because that car is currently about to replaced with an updated one in the US and info on the new version is not yet available on vw.com.) On the other hand, the Jetta Hybrid (1.4L gas engine plus electric boost) is offered in the US (and Germany, of course) but not in the UK.
In the short term, no. Driverless cars at the current state of the art aren't ready to turn loose on roads without a qualified human driver on hand.
In the long term, yes. Driverless cars will become reliable and will eventually be the norm. We're also likely to see roads that incorporate computer guidance; on those roads driverless cars will be mandatory, as human drivers will be unable to use the automatic guidance and would endanger the automatically controlled cars. Eventually driving a car will become something that only a minority of people bother to learn; it will be most common in rural areas where people have to learn how to drive farm machinery.
A good edit will improve a book. A bad edit can damage it beyond recognition, and it's all too common for publishers to impose a bad one though Stross does not seem to have suffered that indignity.
I'd like to see Microsoft abandon RT on tablets and introduce a Surface 3 using a Bay Trail processor. (They can continue with ARM for Windows Phone.) Microsoft's potential unique selling proposition for the Surface is compatibility with existing Windows software; RT can't deliver that. The package could be similar to the Surface 2, which is a nicely built device and would sell decently if it had full Windows capability. The use cases for the less expensive tablet will be more consumption-oriented, so staying with the 16:9 display rather than going with the higher resolution display of the Surface Pro 3 would be fine for its niche.
People use Bluetooth keyboards with tablets all the time. You can get iPad cases that include Bluetooth keyboards.
Speakers are another popular Bluetooth device to use with tablets. The internal speakers of most tablets aren't enough if you want to play music for a group.
I can imagine using a Bluetooth headset with Skype or Google Hangouts to make phone calls with a tablet, but I haven't seen anybody do that.
Funny. But I think the OP was thinking of multipoint fuel injection. http://ask.cars.com/2012/03/wh...
Could well be. That's a big difference between the way Mac OS works and the way that Windows and Linux work. On Mac OS you have to explicitly quit an application to make it go away. On Windows and Linux most applications close when you close their last window. There are a few exceptions. Spotify and Skype have to be explicitly shut down, which you do somewhat unintuitively by right clicking on their taskbar icons and using the popup menu. OpenOffice and LibreOffice don't shut down if you have the Quickstarter enabled. Recent versions of Chrome stay running if you have "continue running background apps when Chrome is closed" enabled and don't free memory.
iOS and Android both work like the Mac does; apps stay in RAM unless you force them to quit. I believe that Metro/Modern apps on Windows 8 also do; it's rather difficult to get those to actually shut down unless you are using ModernMix.
Just because other designs aren't purpose-built as EVs doesn't mean that they can't be successful designs. The Smart electric drive, for example, is well done, and it's really the car that the Smart should have been all along - for the typical use case of a Smart it makes a lot more sense than the gas powered version ever did, and it's a lot more fun to drive because it doesn't have that horribly clunky automatic manual transmission. The gas version isn't enough cheaper or enough cheaper to run than a low-end gasoline car such as a Honda Fit and it's a lot less versatile, so unless parking in urban areas is a big consideration or you're using it a form of mobile corporate advertising the original Smart isn't very smart. Speaking of the Fit, there is also an EV version of that car now.
Electric-only designs: besides the Leaf there is also the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, a car that almost nobody has heard of because of Mitsubishi's inept marketing in the US. It's bigger than the Smart - about the size of a Mini Cooper or Fiat 500 - and ridiculously cheap for an EV right now (around $16,000 after the tax credit). But its 62 mile range (as estimated by the EPA; other methods yield a larger number) means it's also pretty much strictly an urban car.
As for the fate of Ovonics, no generalizations can be made from the fate of those companies. Stanford Ovshinsky was something of a lone wolf inventor who came up with ideas long before their time. Way back in the 70s and 80s his Ovonics company tried to commercialize phase change memory; the semiconductor fabrication technology of the day was not up to the task. (This was long before flash memory became a thing, let alone the current attempts to commercialize phase change memory.) His next company, Energy Conversion Devices, was a maker of both flexible solar panels and NiMh batteries; Ovonics batteries were used in the GM EV-1. Both product lines fell victim to larger economies of scale and lower manufacturing costs in Asia (the battery line was also hurt by the technology transition to LiIon) and the fact that Ovshinsky was far more talented as an inventor than as a manager.
They have been doing a great job of building luxury cars. I see no reason for Tesla to exit that business.
Whether they can compete in the market for more affordable cars remains to be seen. They might well do better as a supplier of batteries for the next generation of Nissan Leaf, Chevy Volt and Spark, Smart Electric Drive, and so on.