I feel for you. I've spent weeks trying to sort out things with Canopy orders. I think the worst one was waiting something like 4 weeks for them to email us some firmware and FPGA upgrades that we had already paid thousands of dollars for.
Where I work, we deal pretty closely on with Motorola on the land-mobile radio side of things, and for that, they do a great job.
Canopy, however, has always felt like a third-party product. I just haven't yet figured out who the third party is.
There is a very good transmission shop not far from my house where they keep and understand such special tools. It could've been rebuilt, and the rebuild would have carried a long warranty. But it would have been expensive (labor, mostly). That would've caused it to cease being a brick. I also looked at possibly buying a rebuilt unit, I just couldn't find anyone selling such a thing that I felt I could trust.
But the whole experience made me very jaded about automatic transmissions in general. Accordingly, the fix that I actually implemented involved replacing the 4L30E with a used 5-speed Getrag that had about 80,000 fewer miles on it. Works good, is simpler, more fun, and will probably outlive the rest of the car. It's an easy swap on an E36 BMW, since they fit together like legos.
The used tranny came with a parts car, too, so I've also got another engine, a nearly-complete set of fidgety electronic bits, and various other componentry.
A "bricked" PSP that can be recovered using a Pandora battery is not bricked at all. It is far more useful than a brick. All it takes is a widget to tell the device to boot from whatever it is that is in the card slot instead of its internal flash. This widget happens to be known as a Pandora battery, and the only thing that is special about it is that its serial number consists of zeroes.
Bricks don't do any of that stuff: I have a pile of them out back, and none of them possess these abilities. A genuinely bricked PSP would resemble a brick, not an electronic device that can easily be brought back to usefulness.
Regarding "user perspective," I have bricked a lot of things (both electronic and mechanical) that I was simply unable to fix myself while being unwilling or unable to pay someone else to do it.
Nonetheless, I am a PSP user. And I am a WRT54G user. And a Droid user. I use them all in ways other than what the instructions say that I should be able to, but that doesn't make me less of a user -- I'm just a user with a different perspective than most have.
Breaking in? It's not like it took prybars and hammers to open the thing. A WRT54G opens with a quick tug using no tools other than a pair of reasonably-strong hands.
Modifying the hardware? A little. But the JTAG header was right there on the board, IIRC it was even labeled. All I had to do was solder some pins to it to be able to plug a cable into it. And I could have done it without even going that far: after all, I just needed electrical continuity, and nowhere is it written that this must involve physical modification. (Soldering is easier for one individual device, but if I had a lot of them to fix I'd have come up with something less invasive.)
Breaking into the JTAG interface? To reprogram the PROM? You've gone off of the deep end. JTAG is a bog-standard and rather simple interface for dealing with flash at a low level. And PROMs aren't reprogrammable.
Another reason why the device was not bricked was that it was not physically damaged: No eFuse was blown, no parts had turned to smoke, and never was it in any particular danger. It just had a bad firmware load. In other words, it was experiencing a software problem. So I loaded new software that worked, once I learned how.
*shrug*
In other news, some layfolk also think that a PC with a crapfested install of Windows is bricked beyond help. This opinion is, of course, wrong. But it is based on their perspective and ability.
To use a car analogy: I have a dead GM 4L30E automatic transmission out back which died suddenly in my BMW. I fixed the car by replacing the transmission, which I knew how to do, so at no time was the whole car a brick. Now: Could the 4L30E be fixed? I guess so, but I don't know how to do that, so the tranny itself is still bricked. To someone else with different perspective and ability, it might be a quick fix, but that someone ain't me. If the day comes that I gain the ability to understand and fix automatic transmissions, or I give it to someone else who already understands these things, then it may cease being a brick.
No. Bricked is forever, as defined by perception and ability -- both of which are subject to change.
A few years ago, I really fucked up a WRT54G when playing with software. I was going to throw it away, when I stumbled across a process for programming it using its JTAG interface and a parallel port. (Which worked fine.)
So was it a brick? The answer is simple, but flexible: It was a brick until I learned that it was possible for me to recover it, at which point it ceased to be a brick.
And now that I know how to deal with these issues, I can't successfully brick a WRT54G in the same fashion.
A dozen years ago, I fucked up a PC by flashing the wrong BIOS. Was it a brick? Again, it's a matter of perspective. In this particular case it was not a brick, though most folks would have reasonably considered it to be completely and totally bricked. Why was it not bricked for me? Because I already knew how to fix it: Enable shadow ROM on another computer, and plug the improperly-flashed BIOS into it hot. Then, just re-flash with the correct image, put the hardware back where it was, and move on with life.
Maybe I'm old (I do have a birthday coming up this weekend), but: Back from when I was a kid, I remember a few things about the environment:
1. First, at a young age, it was totally appropriate to throw garbage out of the car window.
2. It then became less appropriate as volunteers started making a lot of press about cleaning up litter on roadways, which (presumably) had previously been left to be mowed into tiny pieces and otherwise never degraded (plastics last forever, don't you know?).
3. Six-packs of cans were still common back then. Pictures of fish and animals stuck inside of six-pack plastic rings became common in print media and textbooks, along with captions about how plastics last forever and will soon ruin everything.
4. Sometime around this point, McDonald's decides, "for the environment," to stop packaging their sandwiches in polystyrene containers. (I suspect it had more to do with their trash bill, since the replacement paper-based packaging compressed far more easily, but I digress.)
7. Folks stopped littering, for the most part, which was plainly evident from the relative lack of trash stuck to fences along the side of the road compared to a few years prior.
8. ??? (there's a gap in my memory about environmentalist plastic concerns which lasts for a decade or so, until:)
9. In 2010, degraded plastics (see part 5) are bad, because fish eat them.
So. I'd like to ask anyone with an answer to put forward, simply:
Assume that we use plastic, and that some small percentage (no matter how much overall mass that is) will end up somewhere dangerous. Which is best/least bad: Plastics that don't degrade, or plastics that do degrade?
My first house was $65,000, 3 bedrooms, 1,200 square feet, nicely finished.
My current house was $55,000, 5 bedrooms, 2,200 square feet, not quite done yet.
Perhaps you live somewhere that housing expenses (and median income) is greater, but I would not have been able to pay either of them off in six years.
This is true only because the U.S. cell phone market doesn't itemize the phone subsidy on the monthly bill. T-Mobile is the first U.S. nationwide carrier to introduce SIM-only plans that cost less than plans that include a phone.
Which is really a totally different thing from actually itemizing the payment on the loan they granted you on your $500 widget.
You must be in the US, where your observations will be blighted by contracts concocted by companies that have a long history of issuing 'free' phones to folks if they just sign up for 2 years of service...
TFA states that the calls are received on their office "DDI block." In US terms, this is the same as a DID block.
Therefore, the numbers are assigned. They are subscribers to them.
The fucking summary accused the writer of being a "telecoms operator," which is perhaps misleading. At cursory glance of TFA(s), they appear to be just an ISP with that happens to subscribe to a whole lot more incoming phone numbers than they currently use in their own office, which simply isn't all that uncommon in a world of VoIP and PRI for any business.
Therefore, any Do-Not-Call list, in any sane country, should apply.
(I was going to href all of the acronyms in this posting, but anyone who is interested can just look them up on Wikipedia for their own selves.)
I was using automatic NetApp snapshots on a hosted ISP (back when a shell account on a remote computer that actually had bandwidth was considered useful enough to pay money for) in 1994.
FFS/UFS, AFAICT, didn't get snapshots until FreeBSD 5.
Please enlighten us to all great things you did 10 years ago that are relevant today...
I learned to work on cars, laser printers, and general electronics. I learned about SSL. I learned about *nix. I learned about NT-based Windows. I learned to build routers. I learned not to string Cat5 overhead across a parking lot to another building. I learned about all manner of audio problems, and by extension a whole lot of general signal theory, by working in a studio. I learned about ground loops, and how to resolve them. I learned to cook. I learned not to drive while angry or shit happens. I learned to start making backups or shit happens. I learned to wear a condom or kids happen. I learned that it's important to show up at work on time, or be forced to find a different job that isn't very strict.
I could go on for a very long time with this not-so-profound list of things that I learned about 10 years ago that are still useful today. But why?
Let's look at one car which is available in both EV and gas-fired form: the Tesla Roadster. At 2,723 lbs curb weight, it's by no means a very heavy car, thanks in large part to a bunch of carbon fiber bodywork and other composites.
However, the the gasoline counterpart (a Lotus Elise) weighs only about 2,000 pounds depending on options, and does so with a fiberglass body.
Not fair, since Lotus and Tesla are two different companies? Fine. A 2001 RAV4 EV, at 3,440 pounds, versus the gasoline version at 2,777 pounds.
Either way, it looks like a trend that an electric vehicle weighs about 700 pounds more than a non-electric. That's not trading a bit of drivetrain mass for fuel mass, that's seven hundred pounds more stuff.
Shaving 700 pounds from any car is a massive challenge. Doing it without compromising safety, in an affordable fashion, at marketable scale is a tortuously difficult if not currently impossible.
I can't comprehend what you've written, because what you've written doesn't make any sense.
You write about motor efficiency, and conclude that it has something to do with energy density of batteries. These things don't have anything to do with eachother.
You write about overall efficiency, and conclude with links about CO2. These things also don't have anything to do with eachother.
There isn't a point to be found. You're like an unshaven crazy person, mumbling to themselves on a street corner. Deal with it.
Electric engines are roughly 3-4 times as efficient as gasoline ones. So you get 3-4 times the effective energy density out of batteries.
Please explain what you mean. Your premise and conclusion are not related, which makes your statement completely nonsensical.
Sure it makes sense. Batteries 30% as energy dense as gasoline will move your car further than the same mass of gasoline. In other words energy density alone is a silly measure, granted even with that the difference is something like 15 times.
Please re-read what you actually wrote (not what you thought you were writing) and understand the basic concepts of premise and conclusion. You started out talking about a comparison between "electric engines" and gasoline engines, while ending with a conclusion about batteries.
What you wrote was like saying the following: "Oranges are roughly 3-4 times more healthful than apples. So you get 3-4 times as much healthfulness from an acre of oranges." The premise is that that oranges are more healthful. But that premise does not lead to the conclusion that an acre of orange trees is more healthful than an acre of apple trees. It might be, or it might not be; the argument presented doesn't fucking say.
Which, you know, is why I asked for clarification. And your own "clarification" doesn't even support your argument.
I'm actually being nice to you and ignoring your grievous factual errors, such as the fact that there are no electric engines in common use, though electric motors are very commonplace.
I'll reply to the rest of your retort when you fix these things and show that you have a clue about what the fuck you're going on about, and demonstrate an ability to communicate your clue with others.
Where "full-tank" I read "full battery." And where "in a hurry," I read "unwilling to stay overnight."
Please rewrite your comment to correct these contextual errors and I'll be happy to attempt to read what you have to offer and respond.
(And please realize that I live in the US, where there's almost always another service station (currently serving gasoline) within 50-75 miles of the last one, even in remote areas.)
Electric engines are roughly 3-4 times as efficient as gasoline ones. So you get 3-4 times the effective energy density out of batteries.
Please explain what you mean. Your premise and conclusion are not related, which makes your statement completely nonsensical.
More importantly you don't need that much energy, almost all car rides are short and electricity can be recharged at home unlike gasoline.
And if that were the issue, we wouldn't even be discussing it. I can already get electric cars that are completely useful and practical for short trips around town, so that the car spends most of its time at home charging. The problem is that none of them are any good at all for leaving town, since there's no available means to recharge them easily, quickly, or without special arrangements.
Less pollution wise than you'd get from gasoline, someone did look into it. Natural gas is a lot better, and used in quite a few places, but even coal beats out gasoline engines.
Citation, please. Adding generation losses, transmission losses, DC conversion losses, battery storage losses, and drivetrain losses to compare it to the total efficiency of an internal combustion engine is a nontrivial thing. Just because some dude on Slashdot assures me that "someone did look into it" does not at all make me satisfied that reality is in any way supportive of the claim.
I just did some quick Googling, and 62.5kW worth of dedicated genset is around $13k to $25k for generating equipment alone. So, to pick a number, it might cost a remote service station $80k to install a single generator-backed rapid charge station (including installation, signage, fancy Toyota-approved hardware, profit, etc).
It wouldn't take a huge amount of regular demand for such a thing to be practical, but I'd think that $80k would still a pretty big chunk of money for such a remote place, which brings up a pretty big catch-22: There won't be demand until facilities exist, and facilities won't exist until there is demand.
Depending on how the agreement reads, Comcast may lose their franchise - as the service they originally promised in consideration for the franchise is being willfully destroyed.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel for you. I've spent weeks trying to sort out things with Canopy orders. I think the worst one was waiting something like 4 weeks for them to email us some firmware and FPGA upgrades that we had already paid thousands of dollars for.
Where I work, we deal pretty closely on with Motorola on the land-mobile radio side of things, and for that, they do a great job.
Canopy, however, has always felt like a third-party product. I just haven't yet figured out who the third party is.
Feh.
There is a very good transmission shop not far from my house where they keep and understand such special tools. It could've been rebuilt, and the rebuild would have carried a long warranty. But it would have been expensive (labor, mostly). That would've caused it to cease being a brick. I also looked at possibly buying a rebuilt unit, I just couldn't find anyone selling such a thing that I felt I could trust.
But the whole experience made me very jaded about automatic transmissions in general. Accordingly, the fix that I actually implemented involved replacing the 4L30E with a used 5-speed Getrag that had about 80,000 fewer miles on it. Works good, is simpler, more fun, and will probably outlive the rest of the car. It's an easy swap on an E36 BMW, since they fit together like legos.
The used tranny came with a parts car, too, so I've also got another engine, a nearly-complete set of fidgety electronic bits, and various other componentry.
A "bricked" PSP that can be recovered using a Pandora battery is not bricked at all. It is far more useful than a brick. All it takes is a widget to tell the device to boot from whatever it is that is in the card slot instead of its internal flash. This widget happens to be known as a Pandora battery, and the only thing that is special about it is that its serial number consists of zeroes.
Bricks don't do any of that stuff: I have a pile of them out back, and none of them possess these abilities. A genuinely bricked PSP would resemble a brick, not an electronic device that can easily be brought back to usefulness.
Regarding "user perspective," I have bricked a lot of things (both electronic and mechanical) that I was simply unable to fix myself while being unwilling or unable to pay someone else to do it.
Nonetheless, I am a PSP user. And I am a WRT54G user. And a Droid user. I use them all in ways other than what the instructions say that I should be able to, but that doesn't make me less of a user -- I'm just a user with a different perspective than most have.
Breaking in? It's not like it took prybars and hammers to open the thing. A WRT54G opens with a quick tug using no tools other than a pair of reasonably-strong hands.
Modifying the hardware? A little. But the JTAG header was right there on the board, IIRC it was even labeled. All I had to do was solder some pins to it to be able to plug a cable into it. And I could have done it without even going that far: after all, I just needed electrical continuity, and nowhere is it written that this must involve physical modification. (Soldering is easier for one individual device, but if I had a lot of them to fix I'd have come up with something less invasive.)
Breaking into the JTAG interface? To reprogram the PROM? You've gone off of the deep end. JTAG is a bog-standard and rather simple interface for dealing with flash at a low level. And PROMs aren't reprogrammable.
Another reason why the device was not bricked was that it was not physically damaged: No eFuse was blown, no parts had turned to smoke, and never was it in any particular danger. It just had a bad firmware load. In other words, it was experiencing a software problem. So I loaded new software that worked, once I learned how.
*shrug*
In other news, some layfolk also think that a PC with a crapfested install of Windows is bricked beyond help. This opinion is, of course, wrong. But it is based on their perspective and ability.
To use a car analogy: I have a dead GM 4L30E automatic transmission out back which died suddenly in my BMW. I fixed the car by replacing the transmission, which I knew how to do, so at no time was the whole car a brick. Now: Could the 4L30E be fixed? I guess so, but I don't know how to do that, so the tranny itself is still bricked. To someone else with different perspective and ability, it might be a quick fix, but that someone ain't me. If the day comes that I gain the ability to understand and fix automatic transmissions, or I give it to someone else who already understands these things, then it may cease being a brick.
No. Bricked is forever, as defined by perception and ability -- both of which are subject to change.
A few years ago, I really fucked up a WRT54G when playing with software. I was going to throw it away, when I stumbled across a process for programming it using its JTAG interface and a parallel port. (Which worked fine.)
So was it a brick? The answer is simple, but flexible: It was a brick until I learned that it was possible for me to recover it, at which point it ceased to be a brick.
And now that I know how to deal with these issues, I can't successfully brick a WRT54G in the same fashion.
A dozen years ago, I fucked up a PC by flashing the wrong BIOS. Was it a brick? Again, it's a matter of perspective. In this particular case it was not a brick, though most folks would have reasonably considered it to be completely and totally bricked. Why was it not bricked for me? Because I already knew how to fix it: Enable shadow ROM on another computer, and plug the improperly-flashed BIOS into it hot. Then, just re-flash with the correct image, put the hardware back where it was, and move on with life.
Maybe I'm old (I do have a birthday coming up this weekend), but: Back from when I was a kid, I remember a few things about the environment:
1. First, at a young age, it was totally appropriate to throw garbage out of the car window.
2. It then became less appropriate as volunteers started making a lot of press about cleaning up litter on roadways, which (presumably) had previously been left to be mowed into tiny pieces and otherwise never degraded (plastics last forever, don't you know?).
3. Six-packs of cans were still common back then. Pictures of fish and animals stuck inside of six-pack plastic rings became common in print media and textbooks, along with captions about how plastics last forever and will soon ruin everything.
4. Sometime around this point, McDonald's decides, "for the environment," to stop packaging their sandwiches in polystyrene containers. (I suspect it had more to do with their trash bill, since the replacement paper-based packaging compressed far more easily, but I digress.)
5. Six-pack plastic universally turns UV-degradable. Other single-use plastics soon followed. Disposable glass bottles disappeared. Pull-tab cans disappeared.
6. Earth Day came back from hiatus.
7. Folks stopped littering, for the most part, which was plainly evident from the relative lack of trash stuck to fences along the side of the road compared to a few years prior.
8. ??? (there's a gap in my memory about environmentalist plastic concerns which lasts for a decade or so, until:)
9. In 2010, degraded plastics (see part 5) are bad, because fish eat them.
So. I'd like to ask anyone with an answer to put forward, simply:
Assume that we use plastic, and that some small percentage (no matter how much overall mass that is) will end up somewhere dangerous. Which is best/least bad: Plastics that don't degrade, or plastics that do degrade?
I don't think we get to have both.
My Windows 7 x64 box has both 32- and 64-bit versions of IE. I didn't do anything special to get them both.
Rumor has it that, out of the box, the 32-bit version is set to be default, but that's rather a different matter.
Good enough -- I hadn't researched them in any great detail beyond what TFA(s) offered.
However: Does any of the verbiage that you posted mean, in any way, that they are not currently subscribers whom are assigned these numbers?
My first house was $65,000, 3 bedrooms, 1,200 square feet, nicely finished.
My current house was $55,000, 5 bedrooms, 2,200 square feet, not quite done yet.
Perhaps you live somewhere that housing expenses (and median income) is greater, but I would not have been able to pay either of them off in six years.
Which is really a totally different thing from actually itemizing the payment on the loan they granted you on your $500 widget.
The reason that the N900 didn't work, while everything else did, is that the Linux Bluetooth stack is shit.
I welcome anyone to show otherwise. I experience the same sort of dumb issues with my Droid.
You must be in the US, where your observations will be blighted by contracts concocted by companies that have a long history of issuing 'free' phones to folks if they just sign up for 2 years of service...
TFA states that the calls are received on their office "DDI block." In US terms, this is the same as a DID block.
Therefore, the numbers are assigned. They are subscribers to them.
The fucking summary accused the writer of being a "telecoms operator," which is perhaps misleading. At cursory glance of TFA(s), they appear to be just an ISP with that happens to subscribe to a whole lot more incoming phone numbers than they currently use in their own office, which simply isn't all that uncommon in a world of VoIP and PRI for any business.
Therefore, any Do-Not-Call list, in any sane country, should apply.
(I was going to href all of the acronyms in this posting, but anyone who is interested can just look them up on Wikipedia for their own selves.)
I was using automatic NetApp snapshots on a hosted ISP (back when a shell account on a remote computer that actually had bandwidth was considered useful enough to pay money for) in 1994.
FFS/UFS, AFAICT, didn't get snapshots until FreeBSD 5.
FWIW.
Mmm. Barbecue.
Please enlighten us to all great things you did 10 years ago that are relevant today...
I learned to work on cars, laser printers, and general electronics. I learned about SSL. I learned about *nix. I learned about NT-based Windows. I learned to build routers. I learned not to string Cat5 overhead across a parking lot to another building. I learned about all manner of audio problems, and by extension a whole lot of general signal theory, by working in a studio. I learned about ground loops, and how to resolve them. I learned to cook. I learned not to drive while angry or shit happens. I learned to start making backups or shit happens. I learned to wear a condom or kids happen. I learned that it's important to show up at work on time, or be forced to find a different job that isn't very strict.
I could go on for a very long time with this not-so-profound list of things that I learned about 10 years ago that are still useful today. But why?
*sigh*
Let's look at one car which is available in both EV and gas-fired form: the Tesla Roadster. At 2,723 lbs curb weight, it's by no means a very heavy car, thanks in large part to a bunch of carbon fiber bodywork and other composites.
However, the the gasoline counterpart (a Lotus Elise) weighs only about 2,000 pounds depending on options, and does so with a fiberglass body.
Not fair, since Lotus and Tesla are two different companies? Fine. A 2001 RAV4 EV, at 3,440 pounds, versus the gasoline version at 2,777 pounds.
Either way, it looks like a trend that an electric vehicle weighs about 700 pounds more than a non-electric. That's not trading a bit of drivetrain mass for fuel mass, that's seven hundred pounds more stuff.
Shaving 700 pounds from any car is a massive challenge. Doing it without compromising safety, in an affordable fashion, at marketable scale is a tortuously difficult if not currently impossible.
I can't comprehend what you've written, because what you've written doesn't make any sense.
You write about motor efficiency, and conclude that it has something to do with energy density of batteries. These things don't have anything to do with eachother.
You write about overall efficiency, and conclude with links about CO2. These things also don't have anything to do with eachother.
There isn't a point to be found. You're like an unshaven crazy person, mumbling to themselves on a street corner. Deal with it.
Please re-read what you actually wrote (not what you thought you were writing) and understand the basic concepts of premise and conclusion. You started out talking about a comparison between "electric engines" and gasoline engines, while ending with a conclusion about batteries.
What you wrote was like saying the following: "Oranges are roughly 3-4 times more healthful than apples. So you get 3-4 times as much healthfulness from an acre of oranges." The premise is that that oranges are more healthful. But that premise does not lead to the conclusion that an acre of orange trees is more healthful than an acre of apple trees. It might be, or it might not be; the argument presented doesn't fucking say.
Which, you know, is why I asked for clarification. And your own "clarification" doesn't even support your argument.
I'm actually being nice to you and ignoring your grievous factual errors, such as the fact that there are no electric engines in common use, though electric motors are very commonplace.
I'll reply to the rest of your retort when you fix these things and show that you have a clue about what the fuck you're going on about, and demonstrate an ability to communicate your clue with others.
I think we see things differently.
Where "full-tank" I read "full battery." And where "in a hurry," I read "unwilling to stay overnight."
Please rewrite your comment to correct these contextual errors and I'll be happy to attempt to read what you have to offer and respond.
(And please realize that I live in the US, where there's almost always another service station (currently serving gasoline) within 50-75 miles of the last one, even in remote areas.)
I'm not interested in CO2, and OP was writing about efficiency. And, where "efficiency", I mean "miles per dollar."
Your CO2 discussion belongs in another thread (and I submit that it probably ends with nuclear energy being king, which is fine by me).
Electric engines are roughly 3-4 times as efficient as gasoline ones. So you get 3-4 times the effective energy density out of batteries.
Please explain what you mean. Your premise and conclusion are not related, which makes your statement completely nonsensical.
More importantly you don't need that much energy, almost all car rides are short and electricity can be recharged at home unlike gasoline.
And if that were the issue, we wouldn't even be discussing it. I can already get electric cars that are completely useful and practical for short trips around town, so that the car spends most of its time at home charging. The problem is that none of them are any good at all for leaving town, since there's no available means to recharge them easily, quickly, or without special arrangements.
Less pollution wise than you'd get from gasoline, someone did look into it. Natural gas is a lot better, and used in quite a few places, but even coal beats out gasoline engines.
Citation, please. Adding generation losses, transmission losses, DC conversion losses, battery storage losses, and drivetrain losses to compare it to the total efficiency of an internal combustion engine is a nontrivial thing. Just because some dude on Slashdot assures me that "someone did look into it" does not at all make me satisfied that reality is in any way supportive of the claim.
Hmm. Kind of like a Chevy Volt.
I just did some quick Googling, and 62.5kW worth of dedicated genset is around $13k to $25k for generating equipment alone. So, to pick a number, it might cost a remote service station $80k to install a single generator-backed rapid charge station (including installation, signage, fancy Toyota-approved hardware, profit, etc).
It wouldn't take a huge amount of regular demand for such a thing to be practical, but I'd think that $80k would still a pretty big chunk of money for such a remote place, which brings up a pretty big catch-22: There won't be demand until facilities exist, and facilities won't exist until there is demand.
Depending on how the agreement reads, Comcast may lose their franchise - as the service they originally promised in consideration for the franchise is being willfully destroyed.
Neat stuff, but how does it eliminate the need for set-top boxes?