I'd like a rollover lease - so much per year/month, and they replace the parts, or even the car, on a regular schedule. Then the batteries become a cost item, and the vendor will work very hard to minimize their lifecycle cost.
IFF one agrees with the whole idea of government using financial incentives (including tax breaks) to implement policy, then the electric vehicle subsidy makes sense as it is arguably helping to get electric car production up the startup curve to justify construction of more efficient, cost effective high volume manufacturing, which will have the effect of lowering costs and increasing competitiveness of electric vehicles sooner, so electric vehicles will become the mainstream, thereby achieving the policy goal. This is equivalent to many other such government programs, including the big high performance chip research facility in Texas that helped the US maintain its superiority in high performance electronics, and NASA's support of the COTS rocket programs like SpaceX, which is well on its way to jumpstarting a US-based commercial space industry that will eventually not depend on government launches. As a space development advocate, of course I strongly encourage that!:D
Sorry, but I think that hummer bit was debunked a while ago. However I believe it's still true that the nickel mines in Canada and Russia are still surrounded by something like 100 sq. miles of moonscape. Lithium batteries will be a better solution, if they can get the costs down.
There are disadvantages. 'Unsprung weight' is a big killer of efficiency. One wants the hardware that goes with the wheel to be as light as possible. If you could completely replace the existing brakes with the motor-generator (technically possible? Could be done with stepping motors, but they are inefficient) then you might have a win, especially if you could eliminate all the transmission, driveshaft and half-shafts going to each wheel. I think the GM show prototype pure electric vehicle platform of a few years ago did use this methodology. It was a flat pancake chassis that contained all the hardware - batteries, electronics, etc., and had exchangeable bodies so you could have a minivan today and a sportscar tomorrow.
The Prius (I rented one) economy graph was fascinating to watch - and instructive, as I saw my fuel mileage go to 4 MPG accelerating up a freeway ramp! But over three weeks I averaged 46 MPG, driving pretty much as I normally do - three mile stop-and-go commute at 25-30 mph and running 70-75 down the freeway on longer weekend trips
I rented a Prius for three weeks, and the acceleration wasn't bad. The car was roomy and overall comfortable - although I pretty much assumed that in a freeway wreck I would die - it's lightly built! But like all the Japanese cars I've tried including my own Subaru, the seats are too short for my legs, too hard and not comfortable no matter how I adjust them - my behind goes to sleep in anything more than a few minute drive. So now I'm thinking of trading in my Outback for a real American car. Even the cheapest 'Detroit' hardware seems to have more comfortable interiors than any Japanese cars. My friend's Kia is better but not really quite there.
11 seconds? That's probably in the bottom 1/5 of all modern cars. (No I didn't look it up.) Here in Massachusetts with its plethora of too-short freeway ramps (some of which even have stop signs at the end!) it's downright dangerous.
I always wondered what things would have been like if Ford had not left the Thunderbird as a pussy car as well. The possibilities! Oh well, sigh.
I recall when (1985 or thereabouts) Ford 'reintroduced' the T-bird. They had a V-6 and a turbo 4. The turbo 4 made it just about as powerful as the V-6, which was a dog. A turbo V-6 would have been enough to motivate me to actually buy one. Another lost opportunity for Ford.
If (as I hope) it appears that the ethanol mandate will be repealed, sell ADM and Cargill short. The mandate is basically a license for these two companies to make money - the result of effective lobbying on their part.
Max varies from state to state. IIRC in Idaho the max on rural freeways is 85 (~136km/h). Here in Massachusetts the max is 65 (104 km/h) but on the freeways the peak of the probability density function varies from 65 to 75-80.
Not to step into a futile argument, but there is already some concern at NTSB and DOT about the dramatic increase in fatalities in single-car accidents involving small fuel-efficient cars - bridge abutments are at least as incompressible as SUV bumpers. I would hope that new rules would be promulgated requiring better survivability in accidents over 30 MPH.
I haven't kept up with the research in the last few years, but I am of the opinion/expectation that the higher the resolution, the more effective the compression for almost all video signals. So doubling the resolution (quadrupling the number of pixels) might only increase the compressed signal by, I'm guessing, 1.4, maybe less.
Since I'm no longer in that business, I resist the temptation to blather on about how modern compression works, and defer to those who are actually up-to-date with compression methodologies.
This raises the question - does Linux have DisplayPort support for any good display cards? (going to search... apparently even today DP is often problematical. More research needed, but I'm not buying anything this week, so this is a future research problem.)
I also need the right spectrum. The monitors we bought from Dell at work really sucked because of the wavelengths chosen for each of the primary colors. They split wide apart. Nobody specs that, so there is no way to tell when buying online. I'm currently using an NEC MultiSync EA241WM. I had that at work, so I bought one for home, too. It has the spectrum that works best for me (colors don't split apart in my glasses).
Interesting - back in 1980 I worked at Tektronix, where they were building some of the first full color graphic terminals (a whopping 640x480 or 800x600!). One of the early complaints from test/beta users was that the screens always seemed out of focus.
After some research, testing and consternation, it was determined that the problem came from using narrow-spectrum pure 'day-glo' colors for red, green and blue. It turns out that the focal length at typical viewing distances was about 1/4" (IIRC) different for red and blue, so it was impossible for the eye to focus on both colors at once. Tektronix switched to more 'earth-tone' phosphors and the problem went away. Somehow using spectral ranges that matched closer the broad spectral sensitivity of the human retina allowed the eye to put things together better. It's possible that the image processing done by the retina and the brain includes some way to clean up the focus issue - the retina and brain are known to do a lot of other very sophisticated processing.
Replacing them with a new programming language that will run arbitrary programs on your computer is not going to solve that because a new language isn't going to have perfect security either.
Why people seem to think security is something that can never be perfected is beyond me. Just because people fail at it regularly, does not mean it actually is impossible.
Or, to put it another way, imagine two trees in a space of all possible 'statements' (programs) in any useful language. One covers all provably false/wrong statements, the other covers all provably true/correct statements. Not only will there be spaces not covered by either tree, there will be spaces covered by both trees.
These days even compiled and assembled languages actually run within a run-time environment (and actually is run on a virtual machine that is interpreted in firmware by the CPU and its friends), making the distinction even less clear or useful. It's been a long while but IIRC, just running "Hello World" in C brings in a dozen or two libraries and the running program will likely be 100K+. And I once worked on a FORTRAN system where the same code could be run using an 'Incremental Interactive Compiler' - effectively an interpreter, useful for composing and debugging, or a classic compiler that generated a monolithic runtime program. The latter was much faster, of course.
Compare the exploding substation to old videos of an ammunition ship (or any old battleship) blowing up because one of the magazines gets penetrated and explodes. The comparison is sparkler vs. Oklahoma City. Actually OK City was tiny by comparison - a ship's magazine might well be holding 100 times as much explosive as the biggest truck bomb every set off. Magazine explosions have launched entire ships into the air, to come down in multiple pieces.
Lasers are (eventually) MUCH cheaper than guns. And MUCH MUCH safer for the crew. And MUCH more dangerous (potentially) to the enemy. The most dangerous threat to a ship is penetration of the ammunition magazine, causing a few hundred or thousand tons of explosive (cordite, whatever) to go "Boom!" (cue picture of ship splitting in two and sinking in seconds). And delivery of all that explosive material, and fuel, is difficult, dangerous and very, very expensive. The delivery cost, IIRC, is five or ten times the cost of the actual ammunition. Fuel costs something like $50/gallon to delivery to ships at sea.
Lasers and rail guns have the potential to make ships much more lethal, much safer to be on (and requiring fewer crew), much cheaper to operate, and able to stay in the battle much longer. A nuclear ship with laser weapons could shoot at some rate essentially constantly, for months if necessary. Someone else noted that a CIWS (Phalanx) carries 2550 rounds, enough for a 15 second burst. Then it takes vive minutes to reload. Five minutes is a LONG time in battle.
I believe that these lasers are focused, so there is some point where the beam reaches minimum width. After that the beam spreads and at some distance comparable to the distance from the weapon to the target, it's going to degrade to less and less destructive potential.
The first airborne drone to be shot out of the sky with a (chemical) laser was back in 1979 or 1980 - there was a picture in Aviation Week. Interestingly, this was several years before the DoD admitted even doing research in the area.
There is lots of information on the web about all aspects of military lasers, what they work on, pictures and videos of tests, evaluation of every issue mentioned in every comment here. I've been following this topic casually for some time, and the data is out there. Google is your friend. But I know, nobody on/. reads TFA much less research the topic - not picking on you, this is just a general statement of fact.:)
I will note that the major 'win' for laser systems and to a lesser extent rail guns is logistics. A military organization is basically like UPS - it's all about getting parts, ammunition, fuel, and people delivered where it's needed. Ammunition in particular is a huge PITA - dangerous in transit, bulky, and dangerous when stored on a ship. The classic 'torpedo hit' in the movies is when the torpedo penetrates one of the magazines on a ship, which then explodes en masse, and the ship splits in two - or in dozens! The cost of delivering the ammunition to the ship exceeds the cost of the actual ammunition, and delivery of fuel is several times as expensive as the fuel.
For perspective, the guns on the old battleships like USS Missouri took several 100 lb. bags of cordite to fire off one shell. That's a lot of explosive. Eliminating that explosive makes more room for actual delivered shells, and eliminates a ship's greatest existential threat - an exploding magazine.
Using rail guns the only explosives would be whatever the shell being shot contains (which, if it is hypersonic, may be none - kinetic impact may be enough). Using lasers, a nuclear ship could essentially shoot continuously (at some rate) indefinitely - they would 'never' run out of ammo. So yes, this is still experimental. They are still working on increasing operational (as opposed to research) power output to the 100 KW range where things really get 'interesting'. But General Atomic already has a 150 KW laser running in research.
First off, I don't consider myself a sailor, but I have crossed the Atlantic Ocean a few times on my 48 ft boat.
As a less-experienced but reasonably well read (for whatever that is worth) sailor, I would say that is possibly the wisest thing I've read on this thread. If you ever need crew, give me a PM. I'm working on repairs to the hull of my 40 foot motorsailer, and have done a small amount of offshore crewing.
From what I've read, it's true that for bigger boats especially, if you're going to be caught in a hurricane, it's safer being out at sea than close to all those hard things that the shore involves. But that does assume the boat is seaworthy. In this case that was (as we now know) a fatal assumption - or more likely, vain hope. In this case, I think the best thing to do would have been to dock or anchor the boat as well as can be done and remove all the crew to a hotel, and hope rather vainly that the boat would survive. But they probably didn't have the necessary lines to tie it down, nor a good 'hurricane hole' to go to. At least the crew would not have been in jeopardy. Sometimes it's necessary to put life and limb ahead of assets.
Different strokes:) IIRC Kickstarter pretty much demands at least one video. I'm told that good videos make a huge difference in the success of a campaign. Most folks just like the eye candy, and many people basically don't want to read the prose - they make their pledge decision based on the video. Or, if the video piques their interest, then they'll start reading (and look at the first couple of paragraphs, then the rewards. So you're probably in the minority. It would be interesting to do an eye tracking study of different campaigns, then survey the users to get their responses to the campaigns, and compare the data.
I recall when EBay first moved to Sun/Oracle several years ago, shortly thereafter they were down for a day or two. As I recall the loss of income was several $million. That's the kind of number that makes the CIO not sleep at night, and lose hair.
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I'd like a rollover lease - so much per year/month, and they replace the parts, or even the car, on a regular schedule. Then the batteries become a cost item, and the vendor will work very hard to minimize their lifecycle cost.
IFF one agrees with the whole idea of government using financial incentives (including tax breaks) to implement policy, then the electric vehicle subsidy makes sense as it is arguably helping to get electric car production up the startup curve to justify construction of more efficient, cost effective high volume manufacturing, which will have the effect of lowering costs and increasing competitiveness of electric vehicles sooner, so electric vehicles will become the mainstream, thereby achieving the policy goal. This is equivalent to many other such government programs, including the big high performance chip research facility in Texas that helped the US maintain its superiority in high performance electronics, and NASA's support of the COTS rocket programs like SpaceX, which is well on its way to jumpstarting a US-based commercial space industry that will eventually not depend on government launches. As a space development advocate, of course I strongly encourage that! :D
Sorry, but I think that hummer bit was debunked a while ago. However I believe it's still true that the nickel mines in Canada and Russia are still surrounded by something like 100 sq. miles of moonscape. Lithium batteries will be a better solution, if they can get the costs down.
There are disadvantages. 'Unsprung weight' is a big killer of efficiency. One wants the hardware that goes with the wheel to be as light as possible. If you could completely replace the existing brakes with the motor-generator (technically possible? Could be done with stepping motors, but they are inefficient) then you might have a win, especially if you could eliminate all the transmission, driveshaft and half-shafts going to each wheel. I think the GM show prototype pure electric vehicle platform of a few years ago did use this methodology. It was a flat pancake chassis that contained all the hardware - batteries, electronics, etc., and had exchangeable bodies so you could have a minivan today and a sportscar tomorrow.
The Prius (I rented one) economy graph was fascinating to watch - and instructive, as I saw my fuel mileage go to 4 MPG accelerating up a freeway ramp! But over three weeks I averaged 46 MPG, driving pretty much as I normally do - three mile stop-and-go commute at 25-30 mph and running 70-75 down the freeway on longer weekend trips
I rented a Prius for three weeks, and the acceleration wasn't bad. The car was roomy and overall comfortable - although I pretty much assumed that in a freeway wreck I would die - it's lightly built! But like all the Japanese cars I've tried including my own Subaru, the seats are too short for my legs, too hard and not comfortable no matter how I adjust them - my behind goes to sleep in anything more than a few minute drive. So now I'm thinking of trading in my Outback for a real American car. Even the cheapest 'Detroit' hardware seems to have more comfortable interiors than any Japanese cars. My friend's Kia is better but not really quite there.
11 seconds? That's probably in the bottom 1/5 of all modern cars. (No I didn't look it up.) Here in Massachusetts with its plethora of too-short freeway ramps (some of which even have stop signs at the end!) it's downright dangerous.
I always wondered what things would have been like if Ford had not left the Thunderbird as a pussy car as well. The possibilities! Oh well, sigh.
I recall when (1985 or thereabouts) Ford 'reintroduced' the T-bird. They had a V-6 and a turbo 4. The turbo 4 made it just about as powerful as the V-6, which was a dog. A turbo V-6 would have been enough to motivate me to actually buy one. Another lost opportunity for Ford.
If (as I hope) it appears that the ethanol mandate will be repealed, sell ADM and Cargill short. The mandate is basically a license for these two companies to make money - the result of effective lobbying on their part.
Max varies from state to state. IIRC in Idaho the max on rural freeways is 85 (~136km/h). Here in Massachusetts the max is 65 (104 km/h) but on the freeways the peak of the probability density function varies from 65 to 75-80.
13,000 HP* is plenty. (My other car is a Falcon 9! :D )
* OK, actually 9*147,000 lbs thrust. It's not a simple comparison.
Not to step into a futile argument, but there is already some concern at NTSB and DOT about the dramatic increase in fatalities in single-car accidents involving small fuel-efficient cars - bridge abutments are at least as incompressible as SUV bumpers. I would hope that new rules would be promulgated requiring better survivability in accidents over 30 MPH.
I haven't kept up with the research in the last few years, but I am of the opinion/expectation that the higher the resolution, the more effective the compression for almost all video signals. So doubling the resolution (quadrupling the number of pixels) might only increase the compressed signal by, I'm guessing, 1.4, maybe less.
Since I'm no longer in that business, I resist the temptation to blather on about how modern compression works, and defer to those who are actually up-to-date with compression methodologies.
This raises the question - does Linux have DisplayPort support for any good display cards? (going to search ... apparently even today DP is often problematical. More research needed, but I'm not buying anything this week, so this is a future research problem.)
I also need the right spectrum. The monitors we bought from Dell at work really sucked because of the wavelengths chosen for each of the primary colors. They split wide apart. Nobody specs that, so there is no way to tell when buying online. I'm currently using an NEC MultiSync EA241WM. I had that at work, so I bought one for home, too. It has the spectrum that works best for me (colors don't split apart in my glasses).
Interesting - back in 1980 I worked at Tektronix, where they were building some of the first full color graphic terminals (a whopping 640x480 or 800x600!). One of the early complaints from test/beta users was that the screens always seemed out of focus.
After some research, testing and consternation, it was determined that the problem came from using narrow-spectrum pure 'day-glo' colors for red, green and blue. It turns out that the focal length at typical viewing distances was about 1/4" (IIRC) different for red and blue, so it was impossible for the eye to focus on both colors at once. Tektronix switched to more 'earth-tone' phosphors and the problem went away. Somehow using spectral ranges that matched closer the broad spectral sensitivity of the human retina allowed the eye to put things together better. It's possible that the image processing done by the retina and the brain includes some way to clean up the focus issue - the retina and brain are known to do a lot of other very sophisticated processing.
Replacing them with a new programming language that will run arbitrary programs on your computer is not going to solve that because a new language isn't going to have perfect security either.
Why people seem to think security is something that can never be perfected is beyond me. Just because people fail at it regularly, does not mean it actually is impossible.
No, Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem means it actually is impossible.
Or, to put it another way, imagine two trees in a space of all possible 'statements' (programs) in any useful language. One covers all provably false/wrong statements, the other covers all provably true/correct statements. Not only will there be spaces not covered by either tree, there will be spaces covered by both trees.
These days even compiled and assembled languages actually run within a run-time environment (and actually is run on a virtual machine that is interpreted in firmware by the CPU and its friends), making the distinction even less clear or useful. It's been a long while but IIRC, just running "Hello World" in C brings in a dozen or two libraries and the running program will likely be 100K+. And I once worked on a FORTRAN system where the same code could be run using an 'Incremental Interactive Compiler' - effectively an interpreter, useful for composing and debugging, or a classic compiler that generated a monolithic runtime program. The latter was much faster, of course.
Compare the exploding substation to old videos of an ammunition ship (or any old battleship) blowing up because one of the magazines gets penetrated and explodes. The comparison is sparkler vs. Oklahoma City. Actually OK City was tiny by comparison - a ship's magazine might well be holding 100 times as much explosive as the biggest truck bomb every set off. Magazine explosions have launched entire ships into the air, to come down in multiple pieces.
Lasers are (eventually) MUCH cheaper than guns. And MUCH MUCH safer for the crew. And MUCH more dangerous (potentially) to the enemy. The most dangerous threat to a ship is penetration of the ammunition magazine, causing a few hundred or thousand tons of explosive (cordite, whatever) to go "Boom!" (cue picture of ship splitting in two and sinking in seconds). And delivery of all that explosive material, and fuel, is difficult, dangerous and very, very expensive. The delivery cost, IIRC, is five or ten times the cost of the actual ammunition. Fuel costs something like $50/gallon to delivery to ships at sea.
Lasers and rail guns have the potential to make ships much more lethal, much safer to be on (and requiring fewer crew), much cheaper to operate, and able to stay in the battle much longer. A nuclear ship with laser weapons could shoot at some rate essentially constantly, for months if necessary. Someone else noted that a CIWS (Phalanx) carries 2550 rounds, enough for a 15 second burst. Then it takes vive minutes to reload. Five minutes is a LONG time in battle.
I believe that these lasers are focused, so there is some point where the beam reaches minimum width. After that the beam spreads and at some distance comparable to the distance from the weapon to the target, it's going to degrade to less and less destructive potential.
The first airborne drone to be shot out of the sky with a (chemical) laser was back in 1979 or 1980 - there was a picture in Aviation Week. Interestingly, this was several years before the DoD admitted even doing research in the area.
There is lots of information on the web about all aspects of military lasers, what they work on, pictures and videos of tests, evaluation of every issue mentioned in every comment here. I've been following this topic casually for some time, and the data is out there. Google is your friend. But I know, nobody on /. reads TFA much less research the topic - not picking on you, this is just a general statement of fact. :)
I will note that the major 'win' for laser systems and to a lesser extent rail guns is logistics. A military organization is basically like UPS - it's all about getting parts, ammunition, fuel, and people delivered where it's needed. Ammunition in particular is a huge PITA - dangerous in transit, bulky, and dangerous when stored on a ship. The classic 'torpedo hit' in the movies is when the torpedo penetrates one of the magazines on a ship, which then explodes en masse, and the ship splits in two - or in dozens! The cost of delivering the ammunition to the ship exceeds the cost of the actual ammunition, and delivery of fuel is several times as expensive as the fuel.
For perspective, the guns on the old battleships like USS Missouri took several 100 lb. bags of cordite to fire off one shell. That's a lot of explosive. Eliminating that explosive makes more room for actual delivered shells, and eliminates a ship's greatest existential threat - an exploding magazine.
Using rail guns the only explosives would be whatever the shell being shot contains (which, if it is hypersonic, may be none - kinetic impact may be enough). Using lasers, a nuclear ship could essentially shoot continuously (at some rate) indefinitely - they would 'never' run out of ammo. So yes, this is still experimental. They are still working on increasing operational (as opposed to research) power output to the 100 KW range where things really get 'interesting'. But General Atomic already has a 150 KW laser running in research.
Well put! :D
First off, I don't consider myself a sailor, but I have crossed the Atlantic Ocean a few times on my 48 ft boat.
As a less-experienced but reasonably well read (for whatever that is worth) sailor, I would say that is possibly the wisest thing I've read on this thread. If you ever need crew, give me a PM. I'm working on repairs to the hull of my 40 foot motorsailer, and have done a small amount of offshore crewing.
From what I've read, it's true that for bigger boats especially, if you're going to be caught in a hurricane, it's safer being out at sea than close to all those hard things that the shore involves. But that does assume the boat is seaworthy. In this case that was (as we now know) a fatal assumption - or more likely, vain hope. In this case, I think the best thing to do would have been to dock or anchor the boat as well as can be done and remove all the crew to a hotel, and hope rather vainly that the boat would survive. But they probably didn't have the necessary lines to tie it down, nor a good 'hurricane hole' to go to. At least the crew would not have been in jeopardy. Sometimes it's necessary to put life and limb ahead of assets.
Different strokes :) IIRC Kickstarter pretty much demands at least one video. I'm told that good videos make a huge difference in the success of a campaign. Most folks just like the eye candy, and many people basically don't want to read the prose - they make their pledge decision based on the video. Or, if the video piques their interest, then they'll start reading (and look at the first couple of paragraphs, then the rewards. So you're probably in the minority. It would be interesting to do an eye tracking study of different campaigns, then survey the users to get their responses to the campaigns, and compare the data.
I recall when EBay first moved to Sun/Oracle several years ago, shortly thereafter they were down for a day or two. As I recall the loss of income was several $million. That's the kind of number that makes the CIO not sleep at night, and lose hair.