Unless he has deviated wildly from his scriptment from '94 or so what you have seen so far is just the setup. The overall story is more complex and vears into more hard sci-fi territory with a revelation along the lines of Solaris; or even more precisely, Robert Charles Wilson's Bios.
The movie is supposed to be 30% live action and 70% photorealistic CG. The story (if it sticks to the old 1990's scriptment) is about a research station on an incredibly biodiverse and seemingly hostile planet. Researchers use genetically engineered "avatars" virtually indistinguishable from the native tool using higher species. A species that appears to be somewhere in the neanderthal stage of advanced evolution.
The base where the research scientists are based is guarded from the hostile plant and animal wildlife by heavily armed space marines and giant auto-turrets that keep the jungle from consuming the facility.
The story (as far as the scriptment goes) is very similar to Robert Charles Wilson's "BIOS" hard sci-fi novel only with more Aliens-esque action.
The "twist" in the story is similar to the idea presented in Solaris, that the entire planet is a living organism with the plants and animals on it either symbiotic or part of the planet's structure. The jungle and it's inhabitants are acting like white blood cells attempting to repel a virus (the human researchers).
The CG from WETA is said to be astoundingly life-like. As big a jump over Gollum and Davy Jones as those characters were over the characters from the Final Fantasy and Hulk (Ang Lee's) movies.
The human sequences are live action. The avatar sequences are 100% CG.
Ah, but if you are going to do that kind of calculation you then have to factor in the costs of exploration, drilling, refining, transporting, storing, and pumping fossil fuels. Plus the intangibles like the economic impact of gas stations to a local economy; etc. You also need to factor in the costs of locating, mining, and processing battery materials vs their real world life span. One could also include the cost of shipping, storing, and recycling the batteries.
Then you get into the maintenance costs. A modern internal combustion engine and its necessary ancillary components comprise hundreds (if not thousands) of components. Many of them moving, in a caustic environment, and subject to wear. Compare that to a BEV where there are a couple dozen drive components with only two moving parts and MTBF ratings. Switch to electric vehicles and suddenly you are only getting the brakes, tires, and transmission/differential serviced. And with regenerative braking your period between maintenance is greatly extended.
The main advantages of electric vehicles are:
1) 90-95% efficient drive train. 2) Can use any energy storage medium that can be converted into electricity. (flywheels, fuel cells, gasoline powered generators, turbines, batteries; etc). 3) More torque at lower (zero) RPM. 4) Less components to wear out. 5) With BEVs you have a centralized fuel delivery system with a pre-built infrastructure that allows you to increase efficiency/environmental impact for millions of vehicles (assuming everyone is driving one) with a single upgrade over a very short period of time. 6) BEVs can actually help balance a power grid by acting as local storage systems for neighborhood power during periods of peak load and consuming poer at off-peak when that power is otherwise wasted.
The Alamo Drafthouse Village in Austin just had all of its screens upgraded to Sony's 4K DLP projectors. Only the second theater in Texas to offer films in 4K DLP.
Right now only Sony and WB are distributing films in 4K, but everyone else is expected to jump on board soon. The 4K projectors must have some nice scalar chips in them because 2K films seem more impressive displayed on them as well.
There are plenty of headphones with larger circumference ear pads that actually completely contain your ears. For good work sealed can the Seinheiser 280 Pro's are a good choice. Fairly inexpensive at $100 with excellent sound reproduction, large ear pads, and really excellent exterior noise deadening. I use them both at work hooked up to my PC and on plane trips powered by nothing more than my iPod Nano. They work so well at blocking exterior noise that most people ask if they are active noise canceling. Very comfy, too. I have moderately large ears and I've gone for 8+ hours at a stretch with no discomfort.
For semi-open and open cans I really like AKG headphones. My old K501's are still going strong. Sure they ran $350 when brand new, but the sound reproduction is really accurate and they are extremely comfortable (more so than the Seinheisers as they use a fabric covering for the pads rather than imitation leather).
By far the best place for headphone shopping I have found is HeadRoom . Their reviews are spot on and their prices are better than just about anyone else's.
Coal and oil are FAR more efficient and readily available than both batteries and hydrogen cells.
Eh? No they aren't. They have a far greater energy density than current battery technology and hydrogen fuel tanks can provide, but their efficiency is terrible. The reason you get more range out of an internal combustion engine, gasoline powered, vehicle is that, even if the best you can do is 30-40% efficiency, the energy storage density is so great that it counter balances the wastefulness of the combustion process.
The only time coal and oil become moderately efficient is in large scale power plants. On the small scale battery electrics kick the arse out of gasoline, diesel, natural gas, and hydrogen (combustion and fuel cell) powered vehicles in terms of efficiency. At the same time, they allow you to leverage a centralized power system to gain the efficiencies of large scale coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear; etc, power generation sources.
Even better, once you have a cleaner source of mass energy production all the battery electric vehicles out there get an instant end to end efficiency upgrade simply by changing out the centralized power source. Instead of each revolution in power generation requiring hundreds of millions of vehicles to be rotated out of active duty you can make massive gains without any end user doing everything different. This is one of the biggest reasons why we should be pushing BEVs as the successor to the ICE vehicle.
ArenaNet is (and was) a wholly owned subsidiary of NCsoft. It is as much an independent developer as E&G (the guys that did L2) were. The Aion team is no more or less an independent entity than ArenaNet.
Indeed, though console online revenue is a tiny fraction of the total subscription based revenue in the US. Basically you have Xbox Live Gold subscribers (~1 million @ $40 a year) and a small population of Final Fantasy XI (most FFXI subscribers in the US play on their PCs) and Phantasy Star Online players. On the PC, World of Warcraft alone accounts for nearly $450 million a year in subscription revenue.
Consoles, in aggregate, generate more game software sales revenue from traditional brick and mortar retail outlets than the PC. Its a bit more difficult to sort out the hardware side. NVIDIA posted a record quarter for its first quarter this year (at $1.15 billion) but that's from a variety of sources and only one of the big two name sin gaming. There is no good way to filter out PC gaming hardware vs non-gaming hardware outside of video cards so we won't try and split up the more than $100 billion a year PC system sales to compare it to the $8 billion or so in console hardware sales.
Sticking with software for a moment; if you compare US PC retail software sales vs US console software sales the PC came in third behind the PS2 and XBOX 360 last year with $900 million from brick and mortar stores (ignoring that NPD collects data from only 60-80% of the market and extrapolates the remainder). If you add back in subscription sales the PC was actually the top (non-portable) platform last year with over $2 billion in software and subscription sales. And if you accept recent evidence that digital sales have reached parity/exceeded brick and mortar sales then the PC is in the neighborhood of $3 billion in software derived revenue per year, or in the same ballpark as the top three console platforms combined.
Of course, all of that is a lot of silly wang measuring using NPD numbers. Which really amounts to comparing one wildly inaccurate (or at the very least, incomplete) set of numbers to another. The frustrating thing is that while NPD uses a lot of hand waving when describing their data collection methods and releases very selective sub-sets of data to the public (remember, their business model revolves around selling the detailed stuff); our illustrious media accepts these numbers as immutable, indisputable, fact. They then turn around and ignore that the $18.5 billion figure includes hardware, software, and accessories sales for nine platforms (PS2, XBOX, XBOX 360, PS3, DS, Game Boy Advanced, and PSP) plus partial software sales from a tenth (the PC) and proclaim that video games outsell theatrical movies tickets by almost two to one. The general public in turn parrots this line ('cause the news is always right) and console fans trumpet the 17 to 1 ratio vs retail PC software sales as proof that the PC industry is essentially dead.
There are many many different formulations of battery referred to as Li-ion. The newer variants such as nano-phosphate Li-ion from companies like A123 are no longer susceptible to thermal runaway, are capable of delivering enormous amounts of current, and maintain excellent energy density. These are the batteries driving record holding electric dragsters such as the Killacycle.
That's the 2008 Camaro. Bumblebee starts out as a 1969 Camaro and at some point in the film becomes a 2008 Camaro (which is a vehicle with design elements intended to evoke a '69 Camaro).
The new nanophosphate based Lithium-Ion A123 cells can be recharged in under 5 minutes (about as long as it takes to fill up the twin 20 gallon tanks in a behemoth SUV) if an appropriate capacity charger is available. These are the batteries powering the Killacycle electric drag-bike to 8.16 second, 156mph, 1/4 mile EV records.
Even the older VRSLA batteries (like those used to start your ICE) used in most home-brew conversions can be recharged in 3-4 hours off a 30A circuit (dump charging from one battery pack to another can recharge those batteries in under 10 minutes as well). Most EV drivers simply plug there cars in at home overnight. It's the equivalent of having someone come to your house and fill up your gas car while you sleep. And if you run out of fuel somewhere all you have to do is find a power outlet. No need to hoof it to the nearest gas station.
Electric cars aren't at a point where they can replace the ICE vehicle entirely, but they are certainly feasible for 90% of the driving that 80% of the US population does.
Actually the better designed conversions (home-brew electric cars made out of factory ICE vehicles) tend to be more stable that the gas car that they started from. While you are generally exceeding the original vehicles weight by a few hundred pounds or more the electric components can be mounted lower and take up less space per pound. The end result being that you lower the CG of the vehicle and make it more stable in the corners.
There is even an EV racer out there competing with the gas cars in SCCA races: http://www.proev.com/ .
The Tesla out performs its brethren (including the Exige) significantly in straight line acceleration and braking while behaving comparably in the corners. Instant, constant, torque, regenerative braking (which helps slow the car without killing the brakes), and a lower CG results in a damn impressive $80K little sports car. People pay a lot more for less.
While the article isn't online, the same gentleman, John Wayland, was featured in this May's Car and Driver magazine. He got 4 pages worth of astonishingly positive article (C&D has a history of negative response to electric vehicles) with some excellent photos.
John's website is http://www.plasmaboyracing.com/ . There you can find videos of his latest races (and other escapades). This year he expects to be breaking into the mid-11's in the 1/4 mile. Not bad for a 1972 Datsun 1200 with no transmission powered by two modified forklift motors.
Erm, but you are willing to park 10-40 gallons of liquid explosive next to your house? Do you have any idea the size of the fireball that a single vehicle's worth of gasoline can make?
Just because something is potentially dangerous does not make it inappropriate to use as a fuel when proper safety measures are observed.
Your assertion that LiPo batteries are the same as Li-Ion batteries is incorrect. Advance Li-Ion cells use a variety of different materials in their construction and generally have a very different composition from Li-Polymer cells. The hobbyist radio control vehicle market is also a rather poor example of proper battery maintenance. The charging and speed control systems in electric aircraft/cars are extremly primitive when compared to most other modern battery management systems, controllers, and chargers; particularly when talking about those designed for larger applications like electric cars.
Note also that these batteries reside in all sorts of common devices that you hold up next to your head, place on your lap, strap to your wrist, and insert into various body orifices. And I really can't remember the last time my watch exploded and burned a hole into the back of my wrist.
As to 6' fireballs...when I was a kid I was into model rockets. One day, after i had been launching rockets all afternoon, I ran out of the wadding that gets packed between the nose cone and the rocket motor. In model rockets a charge is fired into the body of the rocket at the apex of its flight that pushes on the non-flammable wadding which pops the nose cone+chute off. Not wanting to go home without using all the rocket motors I had on hand I decided to use balled up masking tape as wadding. Little did I know how flammable the glue in masking tape is. The fireball was quite impressive. Does this mean that masking tape is a lurking danger in the house, ready to destroy us all? No, it just means one should probably avoid exposing masking tape to explosives.
There's a lot of misinformation in your response as well. The EV1 was not underpowered and had full modern safety equipment. As did the RAV4 EV from Toyota, the Ford RangerEV (only sold as a fleet car), and the Chevy Silverado EV (also only sold as a fleet vehicle). The performance of the EV versions of the gas cars was identical except for range, which has been corrected since these vehicles first came out with LiIon batteries (which are much lighter with better energy density than PbA batteries). Latter version os the RAV4 EV and the EV1 took advantage of early LiIon packs to achieve 120-175 miles per charge.
Modern LiIon batteries from folks like Kokam can be recharged from empty in as little as 2 hours with high amperage chargers like the ones from Nazita Micro (http://www.manzanitamicro.com/chargers3.htm). AGM VSLA (PbA variant) batteries like the Optima Yellow Top or Excide Orbital can be dump charged (one pack to another) in a few minutes. Chargeing off a 50 amp charger from 80% DoD is about a 2 hour affair.
Electric cars ain't slow, either (http://www.nedra.com/). The fastest electric dragster out there run 8 second 1/4 miles regularly. The owner races in Arizona NHRA bracket racing competing with top fuel rail dragsters and was second int he state last year. He's looking for sponsors so he can build his sub 6 second electric dragster.
The top completely street legal electric car (with street tires on) does the 1/4 in 12.245 @ 104.50 mph (http://www.plasmaboyracing.com/videos/pir%20oct.2 2%20run%207.MOV). These are all home made conversions no less. Without access to the money and technology available to major auto manufacturers.
The Tango (http://www.commutercars.com/) may look a little funny, but it has better safety features than modern passenger cars, outperforms the Viper RT/10 and get close to 100 miles to a charge on PbA batteries. George Clooney bouight one recently.
There is really no reason that a 200-300 mile per charge EV that recharges in under 2 hours, carries 4, with all the modern safety features, and better performance than your average sedan. Other than there is no market pressure to create one.
I leave you with a little 6 minute video showcasing the amatuer EV world in all it's weird and wild glory at the Woodburn races in 2003. The original prototype Tango shows up in the second half:
Eh? The libertarian party is generally referred to as being socially liberal and fiscally conservative. They are for the maximum amount of personal social freedoms, minimal government (meaning lack of bloat, not lack of functional rule), and free markets with minimal (not non-existent) regulation.
Except that this isn't true. Films have become less violent in recent years, not more so. Jaws was rated PG and contained severed legs, characters vomiting blood, a child dragged under water in a spray of blood, a desiccated corpse, and other sundry gore. Just one scene like that earns you an R rating today. And R-rated films have been way more tame than they were in the late 70's through the late 80's. Only very recently have you seen a backlash to this in modern independent horror films, and even those are still more tame than a lot of 70's\80's films of the same nature.
While action in Saturday morning cartoons is on the rise again it is decidedly less violent than Saturday morning cartoons in the mid to late 80's. Anime and violent adult cartoons are on the rise, but they are being aired in prime-time or late-night and are targeted at adults, not kids. All this means is that the medium is growing up and being accepted more readily as mainstream (not just kiddy fair).
While there is certainly still a weird imbalance in the US with regards to acceptable violent content and acceptable sexual content, the violence has not increased in entertainment media.
And when it comes to actual violent criminal activity we are at the lowest levels across the board in over 30 years.
Fantasy violence desensitizes to fantasy violence. I know adults that have no problems watching scenes of gratuitous torture in a film that squirm and gag when forced to watch a snake eat a mouse. Despite having played violent games (real, pen and paper, and video) all my life I was traumatized for two days when I accidentally viewed an actual clip of a real solider beheading a second (the link was supposed to be to a tactical military training video).
If you can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy, you have a much bigger problem on your hands than 60 million gamers with bad attitudes and poor impulse control.
Home console sales were down (even with the 360 launch), but portable sales were up. I was responding to the previous poster's assertion that the console market saw an up-turn in software sales. Both console and PC software sales were down. Console hardware sales were significantly down, while portable and PC hardware sales were up.
I doubt piracy has increased or declined significantly over the past year so it is unlikely that ir had any effect on the change in bottom line one way or the other.
Oh and if one fully RTFA's you will see that Gamasutra notes:
As a result of this skewing away from retail, NPD will be changing its PC chart calculation in the near future, as NPD's industry analyst Anita Frazier commented: "NPD will be launching its new definition of the U.S. PC game market this spring which will include a combination of sales from retail, downloads, and both casual and MMO subscription revenues. We expect this will add significant dollars to the PC game market size."
So even NPD concedes that monitoring retail sales alone is not an accurate reflection of the current PC market value.
Slashdot Mirror
**POSSIBLE SPOILER WARNING**
Unless he has deviated wildly from his scriptment from '94 or so what you have seen so far is just the setup. The overall story is more complex and vears into more hard sci-fi territory with a revelation along the lines of Solaris; or even more precisely, Robert Charles Wilson's Bios.
[SPOILERS]
The movie is supposed to be 30% live action and 70% photorealistic CG. The story (if it sticks to the old 1990's scriptment) is about a research station on an incredibly biodiverse and seemingly hostile planet. Researchers use genetically engineered "avatars" virtually indistinguishable from the native tool using higher species. A species that appears to be somewhere in the neanderthal stage of advanced evolution.
The base where the research scientists are based is guarded from the hostile plant and animal wildlife by heavily armed space marines and giant auto-turrets that keep the jungle from consuming the facility.
The story (as far as the scriptment goes) is very similar to Robert Charles Wilson's "BIOS" hard sci-fi novel only with more Aliens-esque action.
The "twist" in the story is similar to the idea presented in Solaris, that the entire planet is a living organism with the plants and animals on it either symbiotic or part of the planet's structure. The jungle and it's inhabitants are acting like white blood cells attempting to repel a virus (the human researchers).
The CG from WETA is said to be astoundingly life-like. As big a jump over Gollum and Davy Jones as those characters were over the characters from the Final Fantasy and Hulk (Ang Lee's) movies.
The human sequences are live action. The avatar sequences are 100% CG.
"only two moving parts and MTBF ratings. "
That should read: "only two moving parts and fantastic MTBF ratings."
Ah, but if you are going to do that kind of calculation you then have to factor in the costs of exploration, drilling, refining, transporting, storing, and pumping fossil fuels. Plus the intangibles like the economic impact of gas stations to a local economy; etc. You also need to factor in the costs of locating, mining, and processing battery materials vs their real world life span. One could also include the cost of shipping, storing, and recycling the batteries.
Then you get into the maintenance costs. A modern internal combustion engine and its necessary ancillary components comprise hundreds (if not thousands) of components. Many of them moving, in a caustic environment, and subject to wear. Compare that to a BEV where there are a couple dozen drive components with only two moving parts and MTBF ratings. Switch to electric vehicles and suddenly you are only getting the brakes, tires, and transmission/differential serviced. And with regenerative braking your period between maintenance is greatly extended.
The main advantages of electric vehicles are:
1) 90-95% efficient drive train.
2) Can use any energy storage medium that can be converted into electricity. (flywheels, fuel cells, gasoline powered generators, turbines, batteries; etc).
3) More torque at lower (zero) RPM.
4) Less components to wear out.
5) With BEVs you have a centralized fuel delivery system with a pre-built infrastructure that allows you to increase efficiency/environmental impact for millions of vehicles (assuming everyone is driving one) with a single upgrade over a very short period of time.
6) BEVs can actually help balance a power grid by acting as local storage systems for neighborhood power during periods of peak load and consuming poer at off-peak when that power is otherwise wasted.
The Alamo Drafthouse Village in Austin just had all of its screens upgraded to Sony's 4K DLP projectors. Only the second theater in Texas to offer films in 4K DLP.
Right now only Sony and WB are distributing films in 4K, but everyone else is expected to jump on board soon. The 4K projectors must have some nice scalar chips in them because 2K films seem more impressive displayed on them as well.
There are plenty of headphones with larger circumference ear pads that actually completely contain your ears. For good work sealed can the Seinheiser 280 Pro's are a good choice. Fairly inexpensive at $100 with excellent sound reproduction, large ear pads, and really excellent exterior noise deadening. I use them both at work hooked up to my PC and on plane trips powered by nothing more than my iPod Nano. They work so well at blocking exterior noise that most people ask if they are active noise canceling. Very comfy, too. I have moderately large ears and I've gone for 8+ hours at a stretch with no discomfort.
For semi-open and open cans I really like AKG headphones. My old K501's are still going strong. Sure they ran $350 when brand new, but the sound reproduction is really accurate and they are extremely comfortable (more so than the Seinheisers as they use a fabric covering for the pads rather than imitation leather).
By far the best place for headphone shopping I have found is HeadRoom . Their reviews are spot on and their prices are better than just about anyone else's.
Coal and oil are FAR more efficient and readily available than both batteries and hydrogen cells.
Eh? No they aren't. They have a far greater energy density than current battery technology and hydrogen fuel tanks can provide, but their efficiency is terrible. The reason you get more range out of an internal combustion engine, gasoline powered, vehicle is that, even if the best you can do is 30-40% efficiency, the energy storage density is so great that it counter balances the wastefulness of the combustion process.
The only time coal and oil become moderately efficient is in large scale power plants. On the small scale battery electrics kick the arse out of gasoline, diesel, natural gas, and hydrogen (combustion and fuel cell) powered vehicles in terms of efficiency. At the same time, they allow you to leverage a centralized power system to gain the efficiencies of large scale coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear; etc, power generation sources.
Even better, once you have a cleaner source of mass energy production all the battery electric vehicles out there get an instant end to end efficiency upgrade simply by changing out the centralized power source. Instead of each revolution in power generation requiring hundreds of millions of vehicles to be rotated out of active duty you can make massive gains without any end user doing everything different. This is one of the biggest reasons why we should be pushing BEVs as the successor to the ICE vehicle.
ArenaNet is (and was) a wholly owned subsidiary of NCsoft. It is as much an independent developer as E&G (the guys that did L2) were. The Aion team is no more or less an independent entity than ArenaNet.
Indeed, though console online revenue is a tiny fraction of the total subscription based revenue in the US. Basically you have Xbox Live Gold subscribers (~1 million @ $40 a year) and a small population of Final Fantasy XI (most FFXI subscribers in the US play on their PCs) and Phantasy Star Online players. On the PC, World of Warcraft alone accounts for nearly $450 million a year in subscription revenue.
Erm...the missing platforms from the list of nine would be the Wii and the GameCube.
Consoles, in aggregate, generate more game software sales revenue from traditional brick and mortar retail outlets than the PC. Its a bit more difficult to sort out the hardware side. NVIDIA posted a record quarter for its first quarter this year (at $1.15 billion) but that's from a variety of sources and only one of the big two name sin gaming. There is no good way to filter out PC gaming hardware vs non-gaming hardware outside of video cards so we won't try and split up the more than $100 billion a year PC system sales to compare it to the $8 billion or so in console hardware sales.
Sticking with software for a moment; if you compare US PC retail software sales vs US console software sales the PC came in third behind the PS2 and XBOX 360 last year with $900 million from brick and mortar stores (ignoring that NPD collects data from only 60-80% of the market and extrapolates the remainder). If you add back in subscription sales the PC was actually the top (non-portable) platform last year with over $2 billion in software and subscription sales. And if you accept recent evidence that digital sales have reached parity/exceeded brick and mortar sales then the PC is in the neighborhood of $3 billion in software derived revenue per year, or in the same ballpark as the top three console platforms combined.
Of course, all of that is a lot of silly wang measuring using NPD numbers. Which really amounts to comparing one wildly inaccurate (or at the very least, incomplete) set of numbers to another. The frustrating thing is that while NPD uses a lot of hand waving when describing their data collection methods and releases very selective sub-sets of data to the public (remember, their business model revolves around selling the detailed stuff); our illustrious media accepts these numbers as immutable, indisputable, fact. They then turn around and ignore that the $18.5 billion figure includes hardware, software, and accessories sales for nine platforms (PS2, XBOX, XBOX 360, PS3, DS, Game Boy Advanced, and PSP) plus partial software sales from a tenth (the PC) and proclaim that video games outsell theatrical movies tickets by almost two to one. The general public in turn parrots this line ('cause the news is always right) and console fans trumpet the 17 to 1 ratio vs retail PC software sales as proof that the PC industry is essentially dead.
There are many many different formulations of battery referred to as Li-ion. The newer variants such as nano-phosphate Li-ion from companies like A123 are no longer susceptible to thermal runaway, are capable of delivering enormous amounts of current, and maintain excellent energy density. These are the batteries driving record holding electric dragsters such as the Killacycle.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/
LotR - RotK - $1.1 billion
LotR - TTT - $926 million
LotR - FotR - $874 million
Total - $2.9 billion
RotK is the second highest grossing film of all time behind Titanic.
All three films are in the top 15 of all time.
DVD sales and ancillary merchandising made billions more for each film.
That's the 2008 Camaro. Bumblebee starts out as a 1969 Camaro and at some point in the film becomes a 2008 Camaro (which is a vehicle with design elements intended to evoke a '69 Camaro).
Here's a video of it in action.
The new nanophosphate based Lithium-Ion A123 cells can be recharged in under 5 minutes (about as long as it takes to fill up the twin 20 gallon tanks in a behemoth SUV) if an appropriate capacity charger is available. These are the batteries powering the Killacycle electric drag-bike to 8.16 second, 156mph, 1/4 mile EV records.
Even the older VRSLA batteries (like those used to start your ICE) used in most home-brew conversions can be recharged in 3-4 hours off a 30A circuit (dump charging from one battery pack to another can recharge those batteries in under 10 minutes as well). Most EV drivers simply plug there cars in at home overnight. It's the equivalent of having someone come to your house and fill up your gas car while you sleep. And if you run out of fuel somewhere all you have to do is find a power outlet. No need to hoof it to the nearest gas station.
Electric cars aren't at a point where they can replace the ICE vehicle entirely, but they are certainly feasible for 90% of the driving that 80% of the US population does.
Actually the better designed conversions (home-brew electric cars made out of factory ICE vehicles) tend to be more stable that the gas car that they started from. While you are generally exceeding the original vehicles weight by a few hundred pounds or more the electric components can be mounted lower and take up less space per pound. The end result being that you lower the CG of the vehicle and make it more stable in the corners.
There is even an EV racer out there competing with the gas cars in SCCA races: http://www.proev.com/ .
The Tesla out performs its brethren (including the Exige) significantly in straight line acceleration and braking while behaving comparably in the corners. Instant, constant, torque, regenerative braking (which helps slow the car without killing the brakes), and a lower CG results in a damn impressive $80K little sports car. People pay a lot more for less.
While the article isn't online, the same gentleman, John Wayland, was featured in this May's Car and Driver magazine. He got 4 pages worth of astonishingly positive article (C&D has a history of negative response to electric vehicles) with some excellent photos.
John's website is http://www.plasmaboyracing.com/ . There you can find videos of his latest races (and other escapades). This year he expects to be breaking into the mid-11's in the 1/4 mile. Not bad for a 1972 Datsun 1200 with no transmission powered by two modified forklift motors.
Erm, but you are willing to park 10-40 gallons of liquid explosive next to your house? Do you have any idea the size of the fireball that a single vehicle's worth of gasoline can make?
Just because something is potentially dangerous does not make it inappropriate to use as a fuel when proper safety measures are observed.
Your assertion that LiPo batteries are the same as Li-Ion batteries is incorrect. Advance Li-Ion cells use a variety of different materials in their construction and generally have a very different composition from Li-Polymer cells. The hobbyist radio control vehicle market is also a rather poor example of proper battery maintenance. The charging and speed control systems in electric aircraft/cars are extremly primitive when compared to most other modern battery management systems, controllers, and chargers; particularly when talking about those designed for larger applications like electric cars.
Note also that these batteries reside in all sorts of common devices that you hold up next to your head, place on your lap, strap to your wrist, and insert into various body orifices. And I really can't remember the last time my watch exploded and burned a hole into the back of my wrist.
As to 6' fireballs...when I was a kid I was into model rockets. One day, after i had been launching rockets all afternoon, I ran out of the wadding that gets packed between the nose cone and the rocket motor. In model rockets a charge is fired into the body of the rocket at the apex of its flight that pushes on the non-flammable wadding which pops the nose cone+chute off. Not wanting to go home without using all the rocket motors I had on hand I decided to use balled up masking tape as wadding. Little did I know how flammable the glue in masking tape is. The fireball was quite impressive. Does this mean that masking tape is a lurking danger in the house, ready to destroy us all? No, it just means one should probably avoid exposing masking tape to explosives.
Chevy S-10 EV, not Silverado. My bad.
There's a lot of misinformation in your response as well. The EV1 was not underpowered and had full modern safety equipment. As did the RAV4 EV from Toyota, the Ford RangerEV (only sold as a fleet car), and the Chevy Silverado EV (also only sold as a fleet vehicle). The performance of the EV versions of the gas cars was identical except for range, which has been corrected since these vehicles first came out with LiIon batteries (which are much lighter with better energy density than PbA batteries). Latter version os the RAV4 EV and the EV1 took advantage of early LiIon packs to achieve 120-175 miles per charge.
2 2%20run%207.MOV). These are all home made conversions no less. Without access to the money and technology available to major auto manufacturers.
d burn_2003_small.avi
Modern LiIon batteries from folks like Kokam can be recharged from empty in as little as 2 hours with high amperage chargers like the ones from Nazita Micro (http://www.manzanitamicro.com/chargers3.htm). AGM VSLA (PbA variant) batteries like the Optima Yellow Top or Excide Orbital can be dump charged (one pack to another) in a few minutes. Chargeing off a 50 amp charger from 80% DoD is about a 2 hour affair.
Electric cars ain't slow, either (http://www.nedra.com/). The fastest electric dragster out there run 8 second 1/4 miles regularly. The owner races in Arizona NHRA bracket racing competing with top fuel rail dragsters and was second int he state last year. He's looking for sponsors so he can build his sub 6 second electric dragster.
The top completely street legal electric car (with street tires on) does the 1/4 in 12.245 @ 104.50 mph (http://www.plasmaboyracing.com/videos/pir%20oct.
The Tango (http://www.commutercars.com/) may look a little funny, but it has better safety features than modern passenger cars, outperforms the Viper RT/10 and get close to 100 miles to a charge on PbA batteries. George Clooney bouight one recently.
There is really no reason that a 200-300 mile per charge EV that recharges in under 2 hours, carries 4, with all the modern safety features, and better performance than your average sedan. Other than there is no market pressure to create one.
I leave you with a little 6 minute video showcasing the amatuer EV world in all it's weird and wild glory at the Woodburn races in 2003. The original prototype Tango shows up in the second half:
http://www.deadwarrior.com/downloads/AustinEV/woo
Eh? The libertarian party is generally referred to as being socially liberal and fiscally conservative. They are for the maximum amount of personal social freedoms, minimal government (meaning lack of bloat, not lack of functional rule), and free markets with minimal (not non-existent) regulation.
http://www.lp.org/article_85.shtml
The libertarian party is hardly "new conservatism." Rather, it's one of the more logical centrist parties out there.
Except that this isn't true. Films have become less violent in recent years, not more so. Jaws was rated PG and contained severed legs, characters vomiting blood, a child dragged under water in a spray of blood, a desiccated corpse, and other sundry gore. Just one scene like that earns you an R rating today. And R-rated films have been way more tame than they were in the late 70's through the late 80's. Only very recently have you seen a backlash to this in modern independent horror films, and even those are still more tame than a lot of 70's\80's films of the same nature.
While action in Saturday morning cartoons is on the rise again it is decidedly less violent than Saturday morning cartoons in the mid to late 80's. Anime and violent adult cartoons are on the rise, but they are being aired in prime-time or late-night and are targeted at adults, not kids. All this means is that the medium is growing up and being accepted more readily as mainstream (not just kiddy fair).
While there is certainly still a weird imbalance in the US with regards to acceptable violent content and acceptable sexual content, the violence has not increased in entertainment media.
And when it comes to actual violent criminal activity we are at the lowest levels across the board in over 30 years.
Fantasy violence desensitizes to fantasy violence. I know adults that have no problems watching scenes of gratuitous torture in a film that squirm and gag when forced to watch a snake eat a mouse. Despite having played violent games (real, pen and paper, and video) all my life I was traumatized for two days when I accidentally viewed an actual clip of a real solider beheading a second (the link was supposed to be to a tactical military training video).
If you can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy, you have a much bigger problem on your hands than 60 million gamers with bad attitudes and poor impulse control.
Home console sales were down (even with the 360 launch), but portable sales were up. I was responding to the previous poster's assertion that the console market saw an up-turn in software sales. Both console and PC software sales were down. Console hardware sales were significantly down, while portable and PC hardware sales were up.
I doubt piracy has increased or declined significantly over the past year so it is unlikely that ir had any effect on the change in bottom line one way or the other.
Oh and if one fully RTFA's you will see that Gamasutra notes:
As a result of this skewing away from retail, NPD will be changing its PC chart calculation in the near future, as NPD's industry analyst Anita Frazier commented: "NPD will be launching its new definition of the U.S. PC game market this spring which will include a combination of sales from retail, downloads, and both casual and MMO subscription revenues. We expect this will add significant dollars to the PC game market size."
So even NPD concedes that monitoring retail sales alone is not an accurate reflection of the current PC market value.