Want a way to stop people from coming downtown? Raise the rates on the meters even higher.
Number one reason for urban sprawl. Wal-Mart and free parking near the edge of town. It becomes a new surburban center. Then downtown dies and the meters never go away. Nothing left but the down and out. Visit South Chicago for a prime example. The up and mobile left long ago.
Sorry to hear it. It's pretty expensive for the tiny write protect switch on the side. My new camera uses CF. Write speeds are not an issue because the cammera has a large buffer.
You're dismayed that they're putting copy protection on CDs now, so you buy DVDs instead???
Yes you heard me right. DVD's with DRM and all. Now let me explain. In the early days I bought a Laserdisk Player for over $1000. The industry promise was the disks would be cheaper than tapes because they could be mass produced by stamping like LP's. Due to prices that never materialized, that player has less than 8 movies. Instead the videotapes went from about $65 per movie to under $15 per movie. Laserdisks became an elete format and went up in price with some musicals going for over $100 each. The player gets dusted off every couple years to enjoy the few laserdisks I have.
I have a family. Even with DRM, a DVD is much more of a value than movie tickets for a family of 4, plus you get to keep the movie. It's called value.
Right now, the CD's are priced like the old Laserdisks. 40 minutes of material for over $20/hour. DVD's on the other hand are under $10/hour with few exceptions. If DVD's were still over $30 like when they first came out, they would also sit unsold on the shelf.
To top off the whole thing (look for it) there are some DVD's now advertised as playable anywhere (region free)
The article is mentioning the loss of billions of dollars to piracy. Again it looks like the assumption is if it wasn't pirated, a legal sale would have taken place. I have a nephew who was in school and is now in the military serving in Kuait. I have seen his MP3 collection. If each track was a $1 sale instead of piracy, the assumption is he would have spent more on music during his stay at college than I spent on my new car. When I was that age and bought LP's and Tapes (Pre CD's by many years) my collection never even aproached the value of the 10 year old beater I drove at the time. I would have liked to buy an albun a week, but price was prohibitive and still is. I bought about 1 record every 2 or 3 months at that age. That's only 4-6/year. After a decade I had my modest library of about 50 albums (1 boxful). I don't know many people who have invested over $200/year in CD's with or without piracy. Most people I know have a modest CD collection of 100 or less titles for a lifetime collection of $2,000 tops.
College students don't have the money in four years to outright buy new car that I have to get a loan for of many years. Piracy is an opentunistic act of copyright infringement, not theft. A college student with several thousand MP3's is not the theft of several thousand dollars of original recordings. They are cheap copies, not originals taken from rightful owners. Killing piracy of 1,000 tunes does not create the sales of 1,000 tunes at a buck each or create 1000 tunes now on the store shelves that weren't there for sale before. I doubt no matter how many copies iTunes sells of any song, they will have a sellout. Cost of duplication is cheap. The spin folks and the marketing folks both know this but are in denial.
Other than the spin on the financial loss, the article was interesting in the war on piracy.
I personaly buy less CD's now because I'm afraid of getting a non-returnable deliberatly defective disk. I look for the Compact Disk logo for compatibility with my rip-mix-burn setup and portable devices. There are very few CD's anymore with the Compact Disk logo. It makes shopping for a CD like panning for gold. There is lots of shiny stuff out there, but finding the real thing is getting harder as the supply dwindles. I now visit the DVD section instead of the useless CD section. It's money better spent. I'm currently enjoying Old Time radio which is now in the public domain. It's free.
but then your tyeing up your phone, and losing the use of it when your home
Killing telemarkerter's calls when I'm busy studying, reading man's, slashdot, faq's, and such is much better than two lines. Besides, anyone who needs to contact me has my company pager number. If I need to place a call, I know how to drop the connection anytime I need the phone.
Sometimes I leave the computer online while I'm watching a DVD so I don't get phone calls during the show.
No dial-up ISP and no copper phone line means i'm actually SAVING money each month.
My long distance cost me $20 for 24 months. I bought a 560 minute calling card. It expires next month with over 100 minutes left. Phone savings isn't enough for me to pay the extra $30/month for broadband. For me one month of broadband costs more than two years of all my long distance.
Their lawns are not 8" tall all the time, the cars are always clean and they seem to keep a more tidy abode. Coincidence? Hmm...
Um, No! They get stuff done while waiting for the MP3 or ISO to finish downloading. The broadband guys just find another bright shiny thing (tm) to keep them from their chores and family. They also have an extra ~$360/year for gas for the mower and wax for the car.
I envy you almost. At work partial OC96, floppy, CDR, and USB flash drive. It sometimes takes a while to take the goodies home, but being able to grab them on lunch is priceless. Just checked speed on DSLREPORTS to Speakeasy. I got 5824 down and 2364 up. To Megapath Networks 5410 down and 4970 up. I would like a larger USB drive that doesn't cost too much.
It's like the drug pushers...the first hit is always free.
I stick with dial-up at home because the fix at work is free. I do the DL/s at work at much higher than DSL or Cable speeds and dial-up gets me on Slashdot and e-mail on the weekends.
Why spend the extra $30/month if you don't have to? With the (30*12) $360/year saved, I buy a toy like a digital camera or GPS.
In my area Comcast is the only provider. They charge an extra $10/month if your not a cable TV subscriber. The extra surcharge is keeping me from broadband at home.
But in my case, it was cheaper to buy a USB memory fob and just download what I need at work or at the library. Plus I get to keep the fob.
I second that. I'm still transfering the last of the old time radio I found and downloaded on lunch two weeks ago. DSL reports makes DSL and Cable look like Dial-up compaired to my work connection. I need a bigger keyfob. 128 Meg is too small for a lunch break download session. I'd rather have my ~20 Meg DL speed instead of DSL or cable at 0.128 Meg/sec. Dial-up at home is just for weekend e-mail and Slashdot.
I can also dump electric heat and go to gas, propane, wood, wood pellet, etc. Keeping the lights on is a small amount of the electric bill. Power heating & cooling appliances take the lion share. A standard fridge is about $1000 for a good one. An effecient frige for use on solar cells is about $8000. Look them up. Effecient appliances exist. We don't change the fridge or AC to an effecient one, but we do change the low wattage stuff like light bulbs. As electric rates climb, then in new construction, insulation and effeciency become more important even thought the initial cost is much higher.
High repair costs might not be to blame. Technology has made wristwatches and calculators disposable. Tech labor is over $10/hour. A cheap calculator or wristwatch is less than $10. There is no market for repairing these. Because of that, there is no parts market other than a replacement battery. Cars have lots of high tech in them. The skill level of a good mechanic is high. Some one shot high tech parts are very expensive such as air bags and seat belt tensioners. If you don't kill the one shot devices early, the rest of the tech generaly improves the life of the car. Computer controled engines and transmissions have reduced the abuse these got in the past with pinging and hard shifts. Many older cars were ready for car heaven or an engine rebuild at 100K miles. Now it's common for many cars to exceed 300K miles and still pass emissions. Crunching one in a fender bender that deploys air bags is a very expensive event as the safety laws require new certified parts to be used. This is not a usual consumer regular service item. This usualy this is an insurance item. Since the consumer doesn't pay the bill directly but is instead payed by an industry with deep pockets, the usual high mark-up's apply. Consumers are more apt to look to alternatives to high prices and open the market to competition, not the other way around in the current Government and Insurance fed pig trough.
Some technology is making cars last longer. Look seriously into the Toyota Prius. Everyone is frightened of the battery going out for the tune of 5K $. How much is a HID Xeon headlamp?
Now that that is mostly out of the way, here are some facts. The Prius does not have a traditional transmission. It has 13 moving parts. Nothing engauges or disengauges. (no friction parts) No mechanical shifting happens even from drive to reverse. All the high failure items (almost) are taken off the belt. It has no belt driven alternator, power steering pump, smog pump, and even airconditioner compressor (2004 model is electric). It still has a belt driven water pump. The transmission does not need regular automatic transmission type service. It does not have a oil cooler or dipstick. At 30,000 miles a fluid level check is all that is recommended in the service schedule. It does have a couple of additional maitenance items that a traditional car does not have such as changing the inverter coolant and the extra waterpump can be another point of failure, but it's a small electric pump and easly changed.
The fears regarding the $5000 battery; In the United States, there has been no warranty battery replacements. There is a Taxi in New York running over 280,000 miles on the original battery. My older American cars I've had in the past were pretty much wobbeling down the freeway with sagging doors that would not close properly and breaking power steering hoses, radiator cores leaking, alternators and starters dieing, and fuel pump failures at less than 150,000 miles. I'm looking forward to a new level of reliability in an older Prius. If I need to change the battery at 200,000 miles, no problem. They expect the battery to last the life of the car of 15 years. I have not driven many cars over 15 years old lately, so the battery is not an issue with me. The Pirus does not have brushes in the electric motor/generators. It does not have conventional low voltage alternator or starter. Alternator and starter failures are a thing of the past. Believe it or not, (it's been proven) if you have a dead low voltage battery (left the lights on or something) it can be jumpstarted from 8 D cell alkaline batteries. All that's needed is to boot the computer. The low voltage battery is not used to crank the car. That makes the need of a large poluting lead acid battery a thing of the past. The Prius uses a small 12 volt cabin gel-cell battery. Not having all the rest of the stuff on regular cars that break stranding me all the time is a major plus.
I'm amazed that AT&T can make this happen, given the reduced fidelity of a wireless phone connection.
I don't find it hard to believe at all. Since this is to work with Clear Channel and they don't play anything not promoted by a label (no Indi music) and it has to fit the format (playlist in certain hour) it shouldn't be hard to identify one of the dozen songs played in a paticular hour time slot over a low bandwidth cell link.
To see if it really works, don't bother with the radio station. Try it with some of your own 3-10 year old CD's. There you should find the big gaping holes in the search database. When the database is just this weeks top 100, the task shouldn't be too hard. If you have one of the CD's they play, play a flipside track (for those who don't know, 45 RPM singles were played a lot. The hit is on one side. The other side almost never got airtime.). Simply playing a song that doesn't get airtime from a radio hit albun should show the limits of the search database.
I just visited the website. They listed a conventional 5 hoursepower motor and one of the new motors for comparison. The telling was in the effeciency. The conventional motor is 88.9% effecient. The new motor is 93.4% effecient. The new motor simply gets more hoursepower (and draws more power) out of the same size package. However there isn't a super effeciency gain that will get you twice as far on a battery charge. There is no magic free power.
You are comparing a high frequency motor with a 50 or 60 cycle motor which needs a lot of iron to provide enough reactance. Simply changing the frequency changes the amount of iron needed. A great example is take an old fashioned power supply with a 60 cycle transformer of about 100 watts. The transformer will weigh several pounds. Now compare it to a modern switch mode power supply typicaly used in a laptop computer's power supply. They typical also use a iron core (powdered iron) and copper wire just like it's 60 cycle counterpart. It still provides the 100 Watts of power but due to the 50 thousand cycles it runs, the amound of iron needed to provide reactance is much less. Because the core is smaller, the windings can be shorter to reach around a smaller core. Shorter wire means less wire IR squared losses. Now a 100 watt transformer is smaller than a golf ball and makes less heat. This is the simple reason 60 cycle power is not used on airplanes. 400 cycle power is typical. Motors and transformers are much smaller for the same power.
Comparing a 60 cycle AC 50 horse motor with the high frequency ac motor used in the new Toyota Prius will show a huge size and weight diffrence even though the horsepower is close to the same.
Taking a 2 phase DC fan motor and going from 4 pole to say 32 pole at high frequency will increase the effeciency of the motor simply because less iron and wire are needed in the windings.
Large electric motors typicaly have effeciencies of over 80% Don't expect the breakthrough to triple the output of an 80% effecient motor. It can't. Small inefecient motors can see vast improvents in effeciency however. Good examples of low effeciency small motors are vaccuum cleaners, electric drills, skill saws and such that get hot.
pay-in-advance Visa cards you can pick up at Rite-Aid?
Those still exist? I thought they pretty much died because they they were abused so much. A primary example of abuse was using them to sign up for a SPAM sending account with an ISP. Other abuses were for hotel rooms that were thrashed. I'll have to check out Rite-aid and see if they are still avaliable for a totaly anonymous cell phone to call to check my orders from Bin Lauden. (Just kidding)
But seriously, I thought the pre-paid credit cards were toast due to abuse/drugs/rip-off's etc.
The (new) Toyota Prius is just as quick as a V6 Camry, so I wouldn't call it underpowered...
The old one isn't too bad either. Mine (2002)outperformes the small engine (4cyl 1992) Ford Mustang it replaced. Don't knock them. It's got better handeling, twice the mileage and better get up and go. In addition I love the built in NAV system. Other than ordering ahead at the golden arches, it's not too far off the prediction. The golden arches are listed in the points of interest if you wish to find the closest one. In case of a needed freeway detour, you get a choice of many alternates, not the case of the whole freeway dumping on the same side street plugging it up. Having independent maping instead of a one fits all central server helps spread out the alternates. Avoiding traffic jams has more than paid for my GPS in saved time and gas (over 10 hours in 2 years saved). I just plug in my destination and bail at the next exit then choose the detour option and a distance in miles to avoid in the original route. Works great. I've even managed to navigate some planned neighborhoods full of cul-de-sac's on detours. Without a NAV system, I'd never have found the short alternate that got me past a traffic tie-up.
Most consumer hackable cheap FM transmitters are in the 30 mW range. Running 50 watts has two disadvantages.
1 Expensive: Need to buy an exciter (5-150 watt info here:http://www.electrokits.com/fm-transmitters/16 8.htm ) or booster (30mW to 2 watt) and re-tuned 2 meter amplifier (2W to 20-200W). (two meter amplifier info here http://www.wb0w.com/mirage/amplifiers/2mtramps.htm )
2 Interferance: A long range tool will be noticed by all the commuters driving by and may trigger an FCC investigation sooner than something more clandestine. Remember you are transmitting on a local FM radio station frequency. This does not make the FCC happy.
Thanks for the link and the admission the thing is a fictional media art project.
Snipped from the China Police link.
"His recent works has been created within the framework of his self-styled "sci-fi art" (or "fictionist") concept where he takes "an imaginary product from the future" and tests it out today, in a real environment. He did this most notably in his MY DOOMSDAY WEAPON project where he created "the most horrible weapon in the world" (- a piece of "pre-crime technology" designed to mark demonstrators with GPS (Global Positioning System) chips "before the crime is committed"
Slashdot Mirror
Want a way to stop people from coming downtown? Raise the rates on the meters even higher.
Number one reason for urban sprawl. Wal-Mart and free parking near the edge of town. It becomes a new surburban center. Then downtown dies and the meters never go away. Nothing left but the down and out. Visit South Chicago for a prime example. The up and mobile left long ago.
all my cameras use SD :-)
Sorry to hear it. It's pretty expensive for the tiny write protect switch on the side. My new camera uses CF. Write speeds are not an issue because the cammera has a large buffer.
*AA software flags the traffic and me as the originator
;-)
Well Duh! Most people dance to music. Who wrote the song? Who wrote the tune? Who distributed the recording? Is your AVI a silent movie?
-Grins and ducks-
You're dismayed that they're putting copy protection on CDs now, so you buy DVDs instead???
Yes you heard me right. DVD's with DRM and all. Now let me explain. In the early days I bought a Laserdisk Player for over $1000. The industry promise was the disks would be cheaper than tapes because they could be mass produced by stamping like LP's. Due to prices that never materialized, that player has less than 8 movies. Instead the videotapes went from about $65 per movie to under $15 per movie. Laserdisks became an elete format and went up in price with some musicals going for over $100 each. The player gets dusted off every couple years to enjoy the few laserdisks I have.
I have a family. Even with DRM, a DVD is much more of a value than movie tickets for a family of 4, plus you get to keep the movie. It's called value.
Right now, the CD's are priced like the old Laserdisks. 40 minutes of material for over $20/hour. DVD's on the other hand are under $10/hour with few exceptions. If DVD's were still over $30 like when they first came out, they would also sit unsold on the shelf.
To top off the whole thing (look for it) there are some DVD's now advertised as playable anywhere (region free)
The article is mentioning the loss of billions of dollars to piracy. Again it looks like the assumption is if it wasn't pirated, a legal sale would have taken place. I have a nephew who was in school and is now in the military serving in Kuait. I have seen his MP3 collection. If each track was a $1 sale instead of piracy, the assumption is he would have spent more on music during his stay at college than I spent on my new car. When I was that age and bought LP's and Tapes (Pre CD's by many years) my collection never even aproached the value of the 10 year old beater I drove at the time. I would have liked to buy an albun a week, but price was prohibitive and still is. I bought about 1 record every 2 or 3 months at that age. That's only 4-6 /year. After a decade I had my modest library of about 50 albums (1 boxful). I don't know many people who have invested over $200/year in CD's with or without piracy. Most people I know have a modest CD collection of 100 or less titles for a lifetime collection of $2,000 tops.
College students don't have the money in four years to outright buy new car that I have to get a loan for of many years. Piracy is an opentunistic act of copyright infringement, not theft. A college student with several thousand MP3's is not the theft of several thousand dollars of original recordings. They are cheap copies, not originals taken from rightful owners. Killing piracy of 1,000 tunes does not create the sales of 1,000 tunes at a buck each or create 1000 tunes now on the store shelves that weren't there for sale before. I doubt no matter how many copies iTunes sells of any song, they will have a sellout. Cost of duplication is cheap. The spin folks and the marketing folks both know this but are in denial.
Other than the spin on the financial loss, the article was interesting in the war on piracy.
I personaly buy less CD's now because I'm afraid of getting a non-returnable deliberatly defective disk. I look for the Compact Disk logo for compatibility with my rip-mix-burn setup and portable devices. There are very few CD's anymore with the Compact Disk logo. It makes shopping for a CD like panning for gold. There is lots of shiny stuff out there, but finding the real thing is getting harder as the supply dwindles. I now visit the DVD section instead of the useless CD section. It's money better spent.
I'm currently enjoying Old Time radio which is now in the public domain. It's free.
but then your tyeing up your phone, and losing the use of it when your home
Killing telemarkerter's calls when I'm busy studying, reading man's, slashdot, faq's, and such is much better than two lines. Besides, anyone who needs to contact me has my company pager number. If I need to place a call, I know how to drop the connection anytime I need the phone.
Sometimes I leave the computer online while I'm watching a DVD so I don't get phone calls during the show.
No dial-up ISP and no copper phone line means i'm actually SAVING money each month.
My long distance cost me $20 for 24 months. I bought a 560 minute calling card. It expires next month with over 100 minutes left. Phone savings isn't enough for me to pay the extra $30/month for broadband. For me one month of broadband costs more than two years of all my long distance.
Their lawns are not 8" tall all the time, the cars are always clean and they seem to keep a more tidy abode. Coincidence? Hmm...
Um, No! They get stuff done while waiting for the MP3 or ISO to finish downloading. The broadband guys just find another bright shiny thing (tm) to keep them from their chores and family. They also have an extra ~$360/year for gas for the mower and wax for the car.
At work: T3, DVD-Burner, USB Flash drive.
I envy you almost. At work partial OC96, floppy, CDR, and USB flash drive. It sometimes takes a while to take the goodies home, but being able to grab them on lunch is priceless. Just checked speed on DSLREPORTS to Speakeasy. I got 5824 down and 2364 up. To Megapath Networks 5410 down and 4970 up.
I would like a larger USB drive that doesn't cost too much.
It's like the drug pushers...the first hit is always free.
I stick with dial-up at home because the fix at work is free. I do the DL/s at work at much higher than DSL or Cable speeds and dial-up gets me on Slashdot and e-mail on the weekends.
Why spend the extra $30/month if you don't have to? With the (30*12) $360/year saved, I buy a toy like a digital camera or GPS.
In my area Comcast is the only provider. They charge an extra $10/month if your not a cable TV subscriber. The extra surcharge is keeping me from broadband at home.
But in my case, it was cheaper to buy a USB memory fob and just download what I need at work or at the library. Plus I get to keep the fob.
I second that. I'm still transfering the last of the old time radio I found and downloaded on lunch two weeks ago. DSL reports makes DSL and Cable look like Dial-up compaired to my work connection. I need a bigger keyfob. 128 Meg is too small for a lunch break download session. I'd rather have my ~20 Meg DL speed instead of DSL or cable at 0.128 Meg/sec. Dial-up at home is just for weekend e-mail and Slashdot.
I can also dump electric heat and go to gas, propane, wood, wood pellet, etc. Keeping the lights on is a small amount of the electric bill. Power heating & cooling appliances take the lion share. A standard fridge is about $1000 for a good one. An effecient frige for use on solar cells is about $8000. Look them up. Effecient appliances exist. We don't change the fridge or AC to an effecient one, but we do change the low wattage stuff like light bulbs. As electric rates climb, then in new construction, insulation and effeciency become more important even thought the initial cost is much higher.
High repair costs might not be to blame. Technology has made wristwatches and calculators disposable. Tech labor is over $10/hour. A cheap calculator or wristwatch is less than $10. There is no market for repairing these. Because of that, there is no parts market other than a replacement battery. Cars have lots of high tech in them. The skill level of a good mechanic is high. Some one shot high tech parts are very expensive such as air bags and seat belt tensioners. If you don't kill the one shot devices early, the rest of the tech generaly improves the life of the car. Computer controled engines and transmissions have reduced the abuse these got in the past with pinging and hard shifts. Many older cars were ready for car heaven or an engine rebuild at 100K miles. Now it's common for many cars to exceed 300K miles and still pass emissions. Crunching one in a fender bender that deploys air bags is a very expensive event as the safety laws require new certified parts to be used. This is not a usual consumer regular service item. This usualy this is an insurance item. Since the consumer doesn't pay the bill directly but is instead payed by an industry with deep pockets, the usual high mark-up's apply. Consumers are more apt to look to alternatives to high prices and open the market to competition, not the other way around in the current Government and Insurance fed pig trough.
Some technology is making cars last longer. Look seriously into the Toyota Prius. Everyone is frightened of the battery going out for the tune of 5K $. How much is a HID Xeon headlamp?
Now that that is mostly out of the way, here are some facts. The Prius does not have a traditional transmission. It has 13 moving parts. Nothing engauges or disengauges. (no friction parts) No mechanical shifting happens even from drive to reverse. All the high failure items (almost) are taken off the belt. It has no belt driven alternator, power steering pump, smog pump, and even airconditioner compressor (2004 model is electric). It still has a belt driven water pump. The transmission does not need regular automatic transmission type service. It does not have a oil cooler or dipstick. At 30,000 miles a fluid level check is all that is recommended in the service schedule. It does have a couple of additional maitenance items that a traditional car does not have such as changing the inverter coolant and the extra waterpump can be another point of failure, but it's a small electric pump and easly changed.
The fears regarding the $5000 battery; In the United States, there has been no warranty battery replacements. There is a Taxi in New York running over 280,000 miles on the original battery. My older American cars I've had in the past were pretty much wobbeling down the freeway with sagging doors that would not close properly and breaking power steering hoses, radiator cores leaking, alternators and starters dieing, and fuel pump failures at less than 150,000 miles. I'm looking forward to a new level of reliability in an older Prius. If I need to change the battery at 200,000 miles, no problem. They expect the battery to last the life of the car of 15 years. I have not driven many cars over 15 years old lately, so the battery is not an issue with me. The Pirus does not have brushes in the electric motor/generators. It does not have conventional low voltage alternator or starter. Alternator and starter failures are a thing of the past. Believe it or not, (it's been proven) if you have a dead low voltage battery (left the lights on or something) it can be jumpstarted from 8 D cell alkaline batteries. All that's needed is to boot the computer. The low voltage battery is not used to crank the car. That makes the need of a large poluting lead acid battery a thing of the past. The Prius uses a small 12 volt cabin gel-cell battery. Not having all the rest of the stuff on regular cars that break stranding me all the time is a major plus.
I'm amazed that AT&T can make this happen, given the reduced fidelity of a wireless phone connection.
I don't find it hard to believe at all. Since this is to work with Clear Channel and they don't play anything not promoted by a label (no Indi music) and it has to fit the format (playlist in certain hour) it shouldn't be hard to identify one of the dozen songs played in a paticular hour time slot over a low bandwidth cell link.
To see if it really works, don't bother with the radio station. Try it with some of your own 3-10 year old CD's. There you should find the big gaping holes in the search database. When the database is just this weeks top 100, the task shouldn't be too hard. If you have one of the CD's they play, play a flipside track (for those who don't know, 45 RPM singles were played a lot. The hit is on one side. The other side almost never got airtime.). Simply playing a song that doesn't get airtime from a radio hit albun should show the limits of the search database.
I just visited the website. They listed a conventional 5 hoursepower motor and one of the new motors for comparison. The telling was in the effeciency.
The conventional motor is 88.9% effecient.
The new motor is 93.4% effecient.
The new motor simply gets more hoursepower (and draws more power) out of the same size package. However there isn't a super effeciency gain that will get you twice as far on a battery charge. There is no magic free power.
You are comparing a high frequency motor with a 50 or 60 cycle motor which needs a lot of iron to provide enough reactance. Simply changing the frequency changes the amount of iron needed. A great example is take an old fashioned power supply with a 60 cycle transformer of about 100 watts. The transformer will weigh several pounds.
Now compare it to a modern switch mode power supply typicaly used in a laptop computer's power supply. They typical also use a iron core (powdered iron) and copper wire just like it's 60 cycle counterpart. It still provides the 100 Watts of power but due to the 50 thousand cycles it runs, the amound of iron needed to provide reactance is much less. Because the core is smaller, the windings can be shorter to reach around a smaller core. Shorter wire means less wire IR squared losses. Now a 100 watt transformer is smaller than a golf ball and makes less heat. This is the simple reason 60 cycle power is not used on airplanes. 400 cycle power is typical. Motors and transformers are much smaller for the same power.
Comparing a 60 cycle AC 50 horse motor with the high frequency ac motor used in the new Toyota Prius will show a huge size and weight diffrence even though the horsepower is close to the same.
Taking a 2 phase DC fan motor and going from 4 pole to say 32 pole at high frequency will increase the effeciency of the motor simply because less iron and wire are needed in the windings.
Large electric motors typicaly have effeciencies of over 80% Don't expect the breakthrough to triple the output of an 80% effecient motor. It can't. Small inefecient motors can see vast improvents in effeciency however. Good examples of low effeciency small motors are vaccuum cleaners, electric drills, skill saws and such that get hot.
pay-in-advance Visa cards you can pick up at Rite-Aid?
Those still exist? I thought they pretty much died because they they were abused so much. A primary example of abuse was using them to sign up for a SPAM sending account with an ISP. Other abuses were for hotel rooms that were thrashed. I'll have to check out Rite-aid and see if they are still avaliable for a totaly anonymous cell phone to call to check my orders from Bin Lauden. (Just kidding)
But seriously, I thought the pre-paid credit cards were toast due to abuse/drugs/rip-off's etc.
Ever try to use an AOL free CD without a Credit Card? Ever try to cancel the monthly bill afterward?
;-)
By your comment, I can tell you were smart enough to never get an AOL account.
(1 x 24) x 7 = $168/week.
And loss of your ISP connection due to violation of the TOS.
I guess they will find enough short term accounts this way. They don't care that the people they use have a new problem to deal with.
The (new) Toyota Prius is just as quick as a V6 Camry, so I wouldn't call it underpowered...
The old one isn't too bad either. Mine (2002)outperformes the small engine (4cyl 1992) Ford Mustang it replaced. Don't knock them. It's got better handeling, twice the mileage and better get up and go. In addition I love the built in NAV system. Other than ordering ahead at the golden arches, it's not too far off the prediction. The golden arches are listed in the points of interest if you wish to find the closest one.
In case of a needed freeway detour, you get a choice of many alternates, not the case of the whole freeway dumping on the same side street plugging it up. Having independent maping instead of a one fits all central server helps spread out the alternates. Avoiding traffic jams has more than paid for my GPS in saved time and gas (over 10 hours in 2 years saved). I just plug in my destination and bail at the next exit then choose the detour option and a distance in miles to avoid in the original route. Works great. I've even managed to navigate some planned neighborhoods full of cul-de-sac's on detours. Without a NAV system, I'd never have found the short alternate that got me past a traffic tie-up.
Tell that to PIXAR. I don't believe it either.
Ya beat me to that one. I won't post it because it would be modded redundant, but I would have mentioned Google also.
Most consumer hackable cheap FM transmitters are in the 30 mW range. Running 50 watts has two disadvantages.
6 8.htm ) or booster (30mW to 2 watt) and re-tuned 2 meter amplifier (2W to 20-200W). (two meter amplifier info here http://www.wb0w.com/mirage/amplifiers/2mtramps.htm )
1 Expensive: Need to buy an exciter (5-150 watt info here:http://www.electrokits.com/fm-transmitters/1
2 Interferance: A long range tool will be noticed by all the commuters driving by and may trigger an FCC investigation sooner than something more clandestine. Remember you are transmitting on a local FM radio station frequency. This does not make the FCC happy.
The sign would be wrong. I don't think you can buy gas in 1,020 miles. The sign should simply say LAST GAS. No gas ahead.
Thanks for the link and the admission the thing is a fictional media art project.
Snipped from the China Police link.
"His recent works has been created within the framework of his self-styled "sci-fi art" (or "fictionist") concept where he takes "an imaginary product from the future" and tests it out today, in a real environment.
He did this most notably in his MY DOOMSDAY WEAPON project where he created "the most horrible weapon in the world" (- a piece of "pre-crime technology" designed to mark demonstrators with GPS (Global Positioning System) chips "before the crime is committed"