If you want to solve the range problem, your tiny heater isn't going to be very tiny, and it won't be able to run on batteries for very long. The Leaf has a winter pack which includes both insulation and heating, but that is merely to ensure that the car is able to start in cold weather. Think about it, the battery pack is 300 kg, and you want to keep that 15-30 C (depending on ambient temp) warmer than ambient. You don't have available the right combination of space available for insulation and energy for heating to maintain that on battery power.
I'm not sure it relates directly to the use of hydrogen. As you say, a challenge with hydrogen is that it must be cooled. Most coolers perform better, not worse, at low ambient temperatures. I haven't seen anyone demonstrating fuel cells using other fuels at low temperatures. But if you have links, I would be very interested.
If fuel cells operate at lower efficiency when cold, all you need is a battery-powered pre-heater, just like on diesel engines.
I'm not sure I agree it's that simple. The part you pre-heat in a diesel engine (I assume you're talking about the glow plugs?) is very small, let's say 200 grams to exaggerate. A fuel cell is much larger, so it would drain the battery much faster. If you're not talking about glow plugs, I'm only aware of diesel engine pre-heaters which are simply diesel burners. That could of course work for ethanol/propane/whatever, but then you're emitting CO2 again.
Just to clarify my post: I'm not saying "electric cars are stupid, full stop". I'm saying we need significant improvements before a significant part of the population is willing to switch.
I'm not sure fuel cells cope much better with the cold as of right now. When Honda announced in 2004 that their FC stack was capable of starting after being left overnight in a parking lot at -11 C, it was a major breakthrough reported widely in the scientific press. After that, I can't find anything regarding improvements on fuel cells operating at low temperatures.
The problem is that a lot of potential first-adopters of electric cars reside in those areas. Maybe not Russia and China, I'll agree. But the northern half of Europe currently has the highest rate of new car sales in Europe. The electric car needs to get past the partly infrastructural challenges it faces today, and that requires individuals who can buy an electric car despite its current disadvantages, i.e. people who have a second car etc. If many of those people live in areas where electric cars face even more problems due to cold weather, then that is going to be a hurdle towards large-scale adoptation of electric cars.
Going by the several replies with European (and even Asian) countries where OTPs are the norm for internet banking, it looks like you are wrong. Where I'm from (Norway), not only do I need an OTP for internet banking, but I also have to use it when I make a purchase from most Norwegian webshops. It's funny when Ebay is easier to phish than my local small-town computer part store's e-commerce solution.
Actually, you would need to slash those numbers in half. Scientific studies on the total life cycle impact of replacing gasoline with 100% bioethanol in Europe report around 30-50 % reductions in CO2 compared to gasoline. See e.g. slide 12 of this presentation.
The way I see it, cold weather is the major problem facing electric/fuel cell cars. When Consumer Reports tested the Nissan Leaf at -12 C, the range indicator started at 32 km, but the car went into limp-home mode after 13 km. Li-ion batteries are terrible at handling low temp, just ask winter sport videographers about why they continue to use NiMh batteries in their equipment. If you look at the pink parts of this world map, you see roughly the places that get more than 5 days every year with temperatures below -10 C. That includes all of Canada, most of Russia, Northern Europe, most of China, and the northern US. That's more than a billion people.
TL;DR: Nobody is going to buy a car that they know will be (close to) useless for extended periods every winter.
Which is exactly what GP said, as we don't have any feasible storage solutions today. Maybe in twenty years we have insanely good batteries, but in the physical reality we occupy today, base is very much the key problem we need to solve. Storage is a solution to this, but it is not the solution.
And don't give me the "electric car and smart grid" solution, that's nowhere near ready for large scale employment even in twenty years, as you'd have to dig up every street in every city everywhere and replace the power lines.
Thanks for an informative post. I already have three battery-powered flashes, two mains-powered studio flashes and an RF trigger set, so I'm covered there, and I must say proper flash photography is a lot of fun (Strobist and cheap ebay equipment got to me...)
So just to make sure I understand what you're saying: let's say I shoot a portrait of my daughter, using two or three flashes. The background is plain ( e.g. white paper table cloth), and almost all light comes from the flashes. I set custom white balance with a gray card. The intended target is a 20"x30" print for the living room wall. Would the purpose of shooting this in RAW instead of JPEG be that the e.g. 1/3 stop I'll have to adjust it in gimp will be better based on the RAW than the JPEG? Or would it be more that the RAW lets me get more creative in post-processing, playing around with curves and colors to turn the picture into something significantly different from what my camera captured?
Thanks for the links. But if I understand correctly, the bit depth more or less precisely corresponds to the highest dynamic range the sensor is able to capture, right?
The best solution is to have a friend who also runs a Linux server at home. Or hell, even give your friend an old Linux box and set up a Samba mount on it that he can access from Windows. You then each buy two harddrives, and mirror each other. If you don't trust your friend not to snoop on your photos, or vice versa, use encryption.
Since you say you've alternated between JPEG and RAW shooting, I have two questions (out of genuine interest):
1) For a reasonably well-exposed photo where the white balance is roughly correct in the camera, are you able to produce a significantly better end result from RAW than from JPEG? (I definitely agree on using RAW+JPEG when you know exposure could be a problem)
2) Do you have any rough idea about the bit depth the RAW photos need to be at before you get a significant advantage over JPEG? My old camera produced 10 bit RAWs, and at that time I was almost never able to out-perform the JPEG. My new camera has 12 bit RAW, and I haven't really had much time recently (small children here as well) to play around with RAW. But maybe it would be worth it?
When I said not self consistent, I meant claiming
not to reinterpret and then reinterpreting
right to bear as the right to self-defense.
And the failure in separation of power in this case
comes from supreme court judges being
appointed by the president, unlike in sane
justice systems where the position is
advertised and the most qualified candidate
gets the job.
If MS switched to Webkit, I'm betting they would get
some people in the team of maintainers.
Competing vendors have never been a problem
for the Linux kernel, where several of the
large companies employ subsystem maintainers.
Of course you have the unafilliated git on the top
who calls you an idiot in public if you fuck up,
which I suspect is part of the reason.
I can agree with the memory thing, I recently had to
add more RAM to my girlfriend's netbook,
as some of the crappy coded fashion blogs would use
up a whole gigabyte with just a handful of tabs.
The most sensible way would be to require
giving auditors access to source code upon
request, no questions asked. Along
with a few random controls, I could see
that working as a deterrent.
Yes, I believe the supreme court decision
in this case is not only wrong; it is also revisionist, even though it pretends not to be,
and it's not even logically self-consistent.
The supreme court judge system in the US is
another facet of the utterly broken system,
failing to properly implement separation of power.
You can't effectively bear arms if they're locked away so that you can't get to them quickly enough for the "bearing" to be of any use. Check D.C. v. Heller.
Interesting reference. I tend to agree with the decision that banning a whole class of guns (handguns in this case) would be considered unconstitutional. But I don't see where they get the "right to self-defence" from. It's not in the 2nd amendment as I read it. And the court's decision is not even self-consistent:
"[the 2nd amendment's] words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary meaning"
but then goes on to re-interpret "right to bear" as the right to self-defence within the home. This was also rather crassly noted by the dissenting opinion of Justice Stevens, and by Justice Breyer, whose opinion said:
"there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas"
As for your
What "illegal ammo" would this be? You mean like the perfectly legal Glaser Safety Slugs that were designed for air marshals on airplanes and have a hard time penetrating even drywall?
my response is "Huh." I assumed that expanding ammo, being illegal in war, was also illegal for self-defence. That's just weird.
My argument is that there's no right to purchase arms. Just a right to keep them in your house and carry them. Analogy: you have the right to store and drink whiskey, but you don't have the right to purchase it if you can't afford it. Laws that set a minimum price on alcohol have positive social effects (link to study). I don't see how banning cheap guns violates your constitutional right to keep and bear arms, but I definitely see how it would have a positive effect on society.
Slashdot Mirror
Proper smartphone two-factor authentication uses the SIM card. My bank does this, I had to re-enable the system when I switched cell phone operators.
You, sir, owe me a new keyboard. But thanks.
If you want to solve the range problem, your tiny heater isn't going to be very tiny, and it won't be able to run on batteries for very long. The Leaf has a winter pack which includes both insulation and heating, but that is merely to ensure that the car is able to start in cold weather. Think about it, the battery pack is 300 kg, and you want to keep that 15-30 C (depending on ambient temp) warmer than ambient. You don't have available the right combination of space available for insulation and energy for heating to maintain that on battery power.
If fuel cells operate at lower efficiency when cold, all you need is a battery-powered pre-heater, just like on diesel engines.
I'm not sure I agree it's that simple. The part you pre-heat in a diesel engine (I assume you're talking about the glow plugs?) is very small, let's say 200 grams to exaggerate. A fuel cell is much larger, so it would drain the battery much faster. If you're not talking about glow plugs, I'm only aware of diesel engine pre-heaters which are simply diesel burners. That could of course work for ethanol/propane/whatever, but then you're emitting CO2 again.
Just to clarify my post: I'm not saying "electric cars are stupid, full stop". I'm saying we need significant improvements before a significant part of the population is willing to switch.
I'm not sure fuel cells cope much better with the cold as of right now. When Honda announced in 2004 that their FC stack was capable of starting after being left overnight in a parking lot at -11 C, it was a major breakthrough reported widely in the scientific press. After that, I can't find anything regarding improvements on fuel cells operating at low temperatures.
The problem is that a lot of potential first-adopters of electric cars reside in those areas. Maybe not Russia and China, I'll agree. But the northern half of Europe currently has the highest rate of new car sales in Europe. The electric car needs to get past the partly infrastructural challenges it faces today, and that requires individuals who can buy an electric car despite its current disadvantages, i.e. people who have a second car etc. If many of those people live in areas where electric cars face even more problems due to cold weather, then that is going to be a hurdle towards large-scale adoptation of electric cars.
Going by the several replies with European (and even Asian) countries where OTPs are the norm for internet banking, it looks like you are wrong. Where I'm from (Norway), not only do I need an OTP for internet banking, but I also have to use it when I make a purchase from most Norwegian webshops. It's funny when Ebay is easier to phish than my local small-town computer part store's e-commerce solution.
it does put a 5 or 10% dent in the CO2 production
Actually, you would need to slash those numbers in half. Scientific studies on the total life cycle impact of replacing gasoline with 100% bioethanol in Europe report around 30-50 % reductions in CO2 compared to gasoline. See e.g. slide 12 of this presentation.
Mod parent up.
The way I see it, cold weather is the major problem facing electric/fuel cell cars. When Consumer Reports tested the Nissan Leaf at -12 C, the range indicator started at 32 km, but the car went into limp-home mode after 13 km. Li-ion batteries are terrible at handling low temp, just ask winter sport videographers about why they continue to use NiMh batteries in their equipment. If you look at the pink parts of this world map, you see roughly the places that get more than 5 days every year with temperatures below -10 C. That includes all of Canada, most of Russia, Northern Europe, most of China, and the northern US. That's more than a billion people.
TL;DR: Nobody is going to buy a car that they know will be (close to) useless for extended periods every winter.
What you're really saying is that a greenhouse is a Beowulf cluster of plants?
Which is exactly what GP said, as we don't have any feasible storage solutions today. Maybe in twenty years we have insanely good batteries, but in the physical reality we occupy today, base is very much the key problem we need to solve. Storage is a solution to this, but it is not the solution.
And don't give me the "electric car and smart grid" solution, that's nowhere near ready for large scale employment even in twenty years, as you'd have to dig up every street in every city everywhere and replace the power lines.
Thank you again :) I'll be giving RAW a second shot (pun intended) in the coming weeks.
Thanks for an informative post. I already have three battery-powered flashes, two mains-powered studio flashes and an RF trigger set, so I'm covered there, and I must say proper flash photography is a lot of fun (Strobist and cheap ebay equipment got to me...)
So just to make sure I understand what you're saying: let's say I shoot a portrait of my daughter, using two or three flashes. The background is plain ( e.g. white paper table cloth), and almost all light comes from the flashes. I set custom white balance with a gray card. The intended target is a 20"x30" print for the living room wall. Would the purpose of shooting this in RAW instead of JPEG be that the e.g. 1/3 stop I'll have to adjust it in gimp will be better based on the RAW than the JPEG? Or would it be more that the RAW lets me get more creative in post-processing, playing around with curves and colors to turn the picture into something significantly different from what my camera captured?
I think it has more to do with dynamic range than with bit-depth. Just find a contrasty scene, take a RAW picture and try to retain details in both shadows and highlights with your RAW conversion software. http://www.dpreview.com/learn/?/Glossary/Digital_Imaging/dynamic_range_01.htm http://www.dpreview.com/learn/?/Glossary/Digital_Imaging/tonal_range_01.htm
Thanks for the links. But if I understand correctly, the bit depth more or less precisely corresponds to the highest dynamic range the sensor is able to capture, right?
The best solution is to have a friend who also runs a Linux server at home. Or hell, even give your friend an old Linux box and set up a Samba mount on it that he can access from Windows. You then each buy two harddrives, and mirror each other. If you don't trust your friend not to snoop on your photos, or vice versa, use encryption.
Since you say you've alternated between JPEG and RAW shooting, I have two questions (out of genuine interest):
1) For a reasonably well-exposed photo where the white balance is roughly correct in the camera, are you able to produce a significantly better end result from RAW than from JPEG? (I definitely agree on using RAW+JPEG when you know exposure could be a problem)
2) Do you have any rough idea about the bit depth the RAW photos need to be at before you get a significant advantage over JPEG? My old camera produced 10 bit RAWs, and at that time I was almost never able to out-perform the JPEG. My new camera has 12 bit RAW, and I haven't really had much time recently (small children here as well) to play around with RAW. But maybe it would be worth it?
When I said not self consistent, I meant claiming not to reinterpret and then reinterpreting right to bear as the right to self-defense.
And the failure in separation of power in this case comes from supreme court judges being appointed by the president, unlike in sane justice systems where the position is advertised and the most qualified candidate gets the job.
If MS switched to Webkit, I'm betting they would get some people in the team of maintainers. Competing vendors have never been a problem for the Linux kernel, where several of the large companies employ subsystem maintainers. Of course you have the unafilliated git on the top who calls you an idiot in public if you fuck up, which I suspect is part of the reason.
I can agree with the memory thing, I recently had to add more RAM to my girlfriend's netbook, as some of the crappy coded fashion blogs would use up a whole gigabyte with just a handful of tabs.
The most sensible way would be to require giving auditors access to source code upon request, no questions asked. Along with a few random controls, I could see that working as a deterrent.
Yes, I believe the supreme court decision in this case is not only wrong; it is also revisionist, even though it pretends not to be, and it's not even logically self-consistent. The supreme court judge system in the US is another facet of the utterly broken system, failing to properly implement separation of power.
You can't effectively bear arms if they're locked away so that you can't get to them quickly enough for the "bearing" to be of any use. Check D.C. v. Heller.
Interesting reference. I tend to agree with the decision that banning a whole class of guns (handguns in this case) would be considered unconstitutional. But I don't see where they get the "right to self-defence" from. It's not in the 2nd amendment as I read it. And the court's decision is not even self-consistent:
"[the 2nd amendment's] words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary meaning"
but then goes on to re-interpret "right to bear" as the right to self-defence within the home. This was also rather crassly noted by the dissenting opinion of Justice Stevens, and by Justice Breyer, whose opinion said:
"there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas"
As for your
What "illegal ammo" would this be? You mean like the perfectly legal Glaser Safety Slugs that were designed for air marshals on airplanes and have a hard time penetrating even drywall?
my response is "Huh." I assumed that expanding ammo, being illegal in war, was also illegal for self-defence. That's just weird.
My argument is that there's no right to purchase arms. Just a right to keep them in your house and carry them. Analogy: you have the right to store and drink whiskey, but you don't have the right to purchase it if you can't afford it. Laws that set a minimum price on alcohol have positive social effects (link to study). I don't see how banning cheap guns violates your constitutional right to keep and bear arms, but I definitely see how it would have a positive effect on society.