Which is why Cali is loosing businesses in droves... They are moving out of the tax obsessed high rent areas into places like Texas, where the likes of Toyota has moved it's corporate headquarters and other businesses are shifting their staffing. It's happening in Illinois, New York, Massachusetts and many of the traditionally blue areas of the country, business is leaving and heading to states with low tax burdens and low cost of living.
I live in a major city and would take public transit if I reasonably could, but I'm not willing to turn my 30-minutes-each-way commute into 90 minutes.
Which is EXACTLY the problem with public transit, It's almost never convenient for anybody using it, takes longer than driving yourself, and always requires financial support from tax payers because you never can charge the riders enough.
Public transport is great for what it is, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking it is a solution for traffic congestion or that we can make it convenient and cheap enough to get people who have other options to ride it...
You don't want to be SFO because you see it's not working out so well... BUT...
You want to do EXACTLY the same things as SFO as you build *your* economy because somehow you can mange it better. Are you crazy Mr. Mayor?
What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Yea, you are insane..
Just as insane as the guy from amongst your population that decided to pay everybody the same wage, from the janitor to the CEO. He's insane too and now he's broke to boot... I won't go as far as to say EVERYBODY in Seattle is nuts, but if they keep electing people with these kinds of ideas one can safely assume the majority of the voters are crazy.
Having been the guy who got made into the scapegoat and got a swift kick out the door, I can tell you this is true in some places. I didn't get fired, but they sure made it in my best interest to leave, ostensibly because I was set up to fail by the process and I failed to realize they really didn't want to fix the problem soon enough. Being true in some places does not make it universal. MOST places I've worked actually made it a point to accurately find and fix "problems" as they came up and didn't waste the time and effort necessary to find the scapegoat to blame in a sea of CYA documents.
I suspect that VW just doesn't have the corporate culture of ethics over profit, at least at some level. What's happening now is they are in the midst of figuring out exactly what happened. Who did what, who authorized what and who can CYA the most effectively. Problem here is that *somebody* or a group of *somebodies* broke the law in a really big way and there is a real risk of being walked out of the building in handcuffs. This is when corporate lawyers start echoing the standard refrains of "Don't destroy any records", "where is your search warrant" and "don't talk to investigators or the press without a lawyer present" lines to everybody.
Somebody is likely going to jail, or at least facing criminal charges in both the EU and the USA.... Expect there to be a lot of finger pointing from here on out.
Sure, this is exactly what I'm saying. You will need rotating "standby" power already fired up and ready which implies fossil fueled plants are necessary to maintain the grid. I say again: Wind and Solar will reduce fossil fuel use, but it cannot totally replace it.
No, the EULA on the software will be changed and THEN manufacturer liability will end when you accept the 30 page license after they push the next software upgrade Tuesday night.
Not really... You will be required by state law to carry liability insurance which Volvo is not agreeing to provide. They are just agreeing up front to assume liability for accidents where the computer is driving, which is only part of what the state requires you to carry insurance for. Then there is the collision insurance that your lender/leaser will require that you carry as long as you don't own the vehicle outright. There will be plenty of insurance to sell...
Practical storage on an industrial scale is NOT here. At least not in an environmentally friendly or cost effective way.
Batteries of ANY chemistry are environmentally messy to produce and inefficient to use. The rest of your ideas are either environmental nightmares or simply do not scale to sizes large enough to make a difference to the power grid and ALL of them are too inefficient to be viable large scale.
Listen to what I'm saying here... For as long as we depend on the grid being there nearly 100% of the time, wind and solar are only alternative supplies that can cut down on fossil fuel use, but they cannot eliminate fossil fuels. So as long as you insist on keeping your business and home attached to the grid and are dependent on it to be there to supply you power, somewhere there will be a fossil fueled plant ready to supply you power. There currently is no other way because the sun doesn't always shine, rivers are not always full and the wind doesn't always blow, yet folks insist on a grid that's always up.
Look up "Xenon poisoning" for a discussion of the major issues with nuclear fuel cycles.
The concept is a bit complicated to fully understand, but basically what happens is that as you use up the fissile materials in the nuclear fuel there is a build up of neutron absorbing isotopes within the core. Due to the half lives of the various isotopes some of these isotopes take time to appear after the chain reaction has been throttled. Once such isotope is of the element xenon. It is produced by splitting the heaver elements in the reactor core, but because it's really a product of a chain of radio active isotopes splitting it takes a couple of min to appear. This isotope is NOT radio active, but is really good at absorbing neutrons. Once it absorbs the neutron, it becomes radio active and proceeds to decay.
The net effect here is that when you have a constant power draw from a nuclear core, the xenon is "burned off" by the neutron flux as it appears. All is well as long as you keep a constant power setting and there is a balance between the xenon and the neutron flux in the core. The problem is when you throttle down which means you cut the neutron flux by inserting the control rods, but the xenon production remains at a high level for a number of min after the throttling event, which will further increase the neutron absorption within the core and will cause the nuclear reaction to be further diminished. There comes a point where this affect is beyond the operator's ability to overcome by adjusting the control rods and even a small throttling of the nuclear reaction can lead to an uncontrollable complete shutdown. This is most true near the end of the fuel cycle, when the fuel has a lot of waste products to absorb neutrons and not as much fuel to absorb them and sustain a chain reaction.
This affect means the nuclear power plants really don't respond well to throttling. In order to get the most from your fuel, you want to have long steady power levels and avoid making short term changes in your power output. Nuclear plants are thus most efficient when their power out put is very steady for long periods and when throttling down is done very slowly over weeks/months, which doesn't match the power grid's daily/weekly cycles up and down.
Spool up what plant? A fossil fueled one? Even a natural gas steam turbine plant takes hours to go from a cold start to producing electricity. Coal plants generally take longer. The only thing that approaches "instant on" is a standard diesel plant which can go from not running to pushing energy in under 10 min but they are woefully inefficient, produce significant pollution during their start up and are generally unreliable things which require lots of maintenance (and are thus expensive, even when you don't use them).
No, cost efficiency demands that we be ready to back fill the renewables when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining with some kind of fossil fueled "rotating standby" over what you suggest. At least for now, where we expect the grid to be nearly 100% available and have loads of infrastructure designed and deployed assuming electric power is nearly always there. Wind and solar are, at best, just an unreliable source of energy which can cut down on fossil fuel use, but never replace it.
You mean you don't take the time to dissemble the drive, remove the platters and dissolve the magnetic coating in acid? You poor soul.... Personally, I'm content to erase the drive by doing a low level format, but hey, I love to live dangerously given that this won't touch any "bad blocks" replaced by the drive controller....
I'm not surprised in the least. It's hard for folks who barely know how to plug something in and turn it on to comprehend how dangerous the information on that hard drive really is, even if you have deleted all the files you think are important. How many people know (or would care if they did) how the file system on their laptop actually works, that deleted files are NOT gone yet, or that cluster tips and system save/restore and crash dumps can carry a wealth of information even if you have run a multi-pass overwrite program? Very few.
Well, if there is anything good to come from the Hillary E-mail server thing is perhaps the common man will start to realize that they need to be careful to "wipe" (and not just with a cloth) their electronics clean, and deleting something doesn't mean it's gone, only that it's not as easy to find. Heaven help us when folks start to realize that "the cloud" only makes this whole data security thing that much harder, because now you cannot even physically disassemble the device and erase your data that way...
Not really. Not only must power be generated when it's needed, you must not generate more than is necessary or the grid will drift off frequency and voltage and shut down, being unstable. This means you must be ready to throttle up and down your generation capacity to exactly match demand.
Nuclear has issues throttling up and down, especially when you are near the end of your fuel cycle. The difference between off peak and peak demand is an order of magnitude at times. Nuclear is great for background load, say about 10-25% of peak, but unless you have a place to shunt off a LOT of power in the middle of the night, nuclear isn't a viable backup option because you cannot throttle it down. At least for the nuclear power technology we currently have in the USA. There are some reactor designs that are a bit more flexible in their fuel cycles, but they are not generally deployed for power generation in the USA.
Nuclear helps, but it's not the solution to the on again off again nature of solar and wind power problem. There are three solutions we use for peak load capacity now, hydro-electric, geo-thermal, and fossil fuels. The first two are severely limited in long term capacity leaving the third as really the only viable and economically sustainable solution we have.
Maybe Fusion will come along and help us out in the next few decades, but until then, fossil fuels is what we really have to fall back on.
It's only got to over run your storage capacity ONCE to be a problem so YES it's that bad.
Folks need to remember that electrical power must be generated the instant it's used and that using batteries to "smooth out the load" is wildly inefficient when done on an industrial scale. We depend on the grid ALWAYS being on and until we get away from that, Solar and Wind are only secondary supplies.
Unless there's DB credentials or other sensitive information in it.
DB credentials In the SOURCE code? security: FAIL.
You NEVER put the DB credentials in the source, nor do you put things like internal IP's or hostnames. NEVER EVER. At the very least you put stuff like this in separately maintained configuration files. If you are wanting real security then you encrypt said files and provide the decryption key upon system startup. Just putting in plain text credentials is akin to hard coding SQL statements and other such foolish things I've seen folks do. If you have a database, go ask your DBA (you have a DBA right?) how to properly use the thing. If you don't have a DBA, go get one. Cannot afford a DBA? Get another job where they know how to spend their money properly...
They're very reliable. Whenever the sun shines or the wind blows, they work.
The word you're looking for is "intermittent" and that's an entirely different (and already solved) problem.
Already solved? Do tell... How has this problem been solved? Beyond just building fossil fueled plants to make up the difference between supply and demand when the sun don't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
Look, Solar is only going to work, at best, half of the day. Wind power is only good for about 25% of forecast capacity because our ability to tell when and how hard the wind will blow is pretty poor. That leaves us with a significant amount of capacity which must be on standby or we load we can easily shed or we risk the grid going down. Trust me, you don't' want the grid going down and rolling blackouts are messy and dangerous.
BTW... Don't give me this Musk - "We will use batteries!" - idea either. Batteries are hugely expensive to produce and use and are an environmental nightmare when you consider the production, use and recycling process required. Charging and discharging batteries is hugely inefficient and will require we build out our wind and solar capacity to many times the average load or risk running out of power. In fact, ALL methods of storing electrical power on an industrial scale are hugely inefficient and generally environmentally messy.
Where I'm all for using solar where the sun shines and wind where it's blowing, we all need to realize that these two power sources will NEVER replace our current generation capacity and we will need fossil fuels well into the future. Wind and Solar suffer from not being available at irregular times and batteries are not a viable solution for the problem on the industrial scales necessary.
They are building custom hardware and a lot of it so they get a bit of special treatment from Intel.
You engineer the thermal paths and better control how you get rid of heat. You tweak the board layout for the best performance of the chipset and CPU and run closer tolerances on voltages and clock frequencies while keeping it small. Buying in bulk also lets you customize the chipset and CPU packaging to get you better performance/watt and higher density by eliminating all the "fluff" stuff you really don't want on the cloud machine. Who needs all those USB controllers, PCI-e busses, and sound cards you find in your average server chassis in a high density server farm that just take up space and suck power? Just give me a couple of NIC's, a SATA connection and a serial console and a way to reset an individual system and I have what I need to stand up an OS and grant somebody external access to it.
Not there? Then it's up to the states who grant their charter.. I'm guessing few states will sign up for this for fear of running off business and economic activity to tax and the ones that would, are in serious trouble with businesses departing for greener pastures anyway (Here's looking at YOU CA and IL).
Oh sure... The only difference is that if the US company get's in too much trouble, the company just heads to bankruptcy court and reorganizes. If it's bad enough and the company has Union workers, the UAW will demand and get a government funded bail out of said company to keep the union membership employed under the guise of being "too big to fail"....
Exactly. If VW was faking their emissions tests for 6 years, you can bet there is a bunch of people who thought about this too. Some will have yielded to temptation...
I don't agree, many of the problems are exactly or nearly exactly the same, many are worse on the moon, few are better. The advantage of the moon is that it's CHEAPER by virtue of being closer, has some gravity and would serve as a jumping off point for additional research of the moon which has value of it's own. The "unique" parts of the Mars environment could easily be replicated on the ground (or on the moon) as necessary to prove the technology is adaptable, but there is nothing that can replace real experience using a technology when you are dependent on it and far away from help.
But.... Hey, you are entitled to your opinion... I just think you are wrong in this case.
Then why go to Mars in the first place? Pick something else.
We've already established that it's NOT habitable and there is no point in being on Mars... Seriously... (sarcasm) Just aim yourself at the nearest star beyond ours and go have a look... Oh, we are not ready for that yet? Hmmm... Might it be just a bit to distant for us right now? Ok, just head to one of Saturn's moons with you proposed colony... Think big man.... (/sarcasm)
So you see no value in staying close to home and working out the bulk of our problems.... Ok...I think a crawl, walk, run progression is useful here, you apparently don't. I see some possible advantages to being on the moon, you apparently don't.
What now? Shall we settle this with a duel come high noon?
Cars really ARE a low margin business where the possible sales volume is pretty low and the produce is very expensive. Cell phones are generally not the same kind of business, margins are pretty high per unit and the volume is a couple of times that of a cars.
In Q1 of 2014 it is estimated that just Apple sold over 60 million phones, during which the auto industry struggled to sell 10 million units industry wide. This makes the production rate of iPhones an order of magnitude higher than the entire auto industry's unit production.
Margins in cars are *extremely* low, especially given the huge NRE costs that get spread across 1/10th of the units. Building a car is a *huge* and complex undertaking which requires huge amounts of space, very expensive tooling and long supply chains. Automobiles require huge investments in materials and inventory over long terms because it takes a long time from when you start building a car to when it's paid for by the customer.
Cell phones are different. Building and assembly of the hardware is fairly easy and doesn't require huge amounts of space for the tooling or parts storage. You are spreading the NRE across 10X the number of units and the "industrial engineering" portion of the NRE is a LOT smaller for a cell phone. The logistics are easier, the device is smaller and it has a fewer parts by a long shot.
So, where Apple does have the $$ to do anything it wants, including taking over the automobile industry if they wanted, the critique of Apple by automobile experts is valid. It's just that Apple could afford to BUY any expertise it needed to make it work if it chooses to.
Not that iPhone thing in your pocket... You can bet Apple will make a better iOS release that makes that shiny new toy run like a tired worn out dog in about 3 years. It may not be worn out, it's just no longer usable for the new software load with the wiz bang shiny new features that everybody wants.
Of course you can go like me, running that Windows CE device into the ground and finally giving up on it after 7 years... But folks are going to call you a luddite for sure...
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Which is why Cali is loosing businesses in droves... They are moving out of the tax obsessed high rent areas into places like Texas, where the likes of Toyota has moved it's corporate headquarters and other businesses are shifting their staffing. It's happening in Illinois, New York, Massachusetts and many of the traditionally blue areas of the country, business is leaving and heading to states with low tax burdens and low cost of living.
I live in a major city and would take public transit if I reasonably could, but I'm not willing to turn my 30-minutes-each-way commute into 90 minutes.
Which is EXACTLY the problem with public transit, It's almost never convenient for anybody using it, takes longer than driving yourself, and always requires financial support from tax payers because you never can charge the riders enough.
Public transport is great for what it is, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking it is a solution for traffic congestion or that we can make it convenient and cheap enough to get people who have other options to ride it...
You don't want to be SFO because you see it's not working out so well... BUT...
You want to do EXACTLY the same things as SFO as you build *your* economy because somehow you can mange it better. Are you crazy Mr. Mayor?
What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Yea, you are insane..
Just as insane as the guy from amongst your population that decided to pay everybody the same wage, from the janitor to the CEO. He's insane too and now he's broke to boot... I won't go as far as to say EVERYBODY in Seattle is nuts, but if they keep electing people with these kinds of ideas one can safely assume the majority of the voters are crazy.
Having been the guy who got made into the scapegoat and got a swift kick out the door, I can tell you this is true in some places. I didn't get fired, but they sure made it in my best interest to leave, ostensibly because I was set up to fail by the process and I failed to realize they really didn't want to fix the problem soon enough. Being true in some places does not make it universal. MOST places I've worked actually made it a point to accurately find and fix "problems" as they came up and didn't waste the time and effort necessary to find the scapegoat to blame in a sea of CYA documents.
I suspect that VW just doesn't have the corporate culture of ethics over profit, at least at some level. What's happening now is they are in the midst of figuring out exactly what happened. Who did what, who authorized what and who can CYA the most effectively. Problem here is that *somebody* or a group of *somebodies* broke the law in a really big way and there is a real risk of being walked out of the building in handcuffs. This is when corporate lawyers start echoing the standard refrains of "Don't destroy any records", "where is your search warrant" and "don't talk to investigators or the press without a lawyer present" lines to everybody.
Somebody is likely going to jail, or at least facing criminal charges in both the EU and the USA.... Expect there to be a lot of finger pointing from here on out.
Sure, this is exactly what I'm saying. You will need rotating "standby" power already fired up and ready which implies fossil fueled plants are necessary to maintain the grid. I say again: Wind and Solar will reduce fossil fuel use, but it cannot totally replace it.
No, the EULA on the software will be changed and THEN manufacturer liability will end when you accept the 30 page license after they push the next software upgrade Tuesday night.
Not really... You will be required by state law to carry liability insurance which Volvo is not agreeing to provide. They are just agreeing up front to assume liability for accidents where the computer is driving, which is only part of what the state requires you to carry insurance for. Then there is the collision insurance that your lender/leaser will require that you carry as long as you don't own the vehicle outright. There will be plenty of insurance to sell...
Practical storage on an industrial scale is NOT here. At least not in an environmentally friendly or cost effective way.
Batteries of ANY chemistry are environmentally messy to produce and inefficient to use. The rest of your ideas are either environmental nightmares or simply do not scale to sizes large enough to make a difference to the power grid and ALL of them are too inefficient to be viable large scale.
Listen to what I'm saying here... For as long as we depend on the grid being there nearly 100% of the time, wind and solar are only alternative supplies that can cut down on fossil fuel use, but they cannot eliminate fossil fuels. So as long as you insist on keeping your business and home attached to the grid and are dependent on it to be there to supply you power, somewhere there will be a fossil fueled plant ready to supply you power. There currently is no other way because the sun doesn't always shine, rivers are not always full and the wind doesn't always blow, yet folks insist on a grid that's always up.
Look up "Xenon poisoning" for a discussion of the major issues with nuclear fuel cycles.
The concept is a bit complicated to fully understand, but basically what happens is that as you use up the fissile materials in the nuclear fuel there is a build up of neutron absorbing isotopes within the core. Due to the half lives of the various isotopes some of these isotopes take time to appear after the chain reaction has been throttled. Once such isotope is of the element xenon. It is produced by splitting the heaver elements in the reactor core, but because it's really a product of a chain of radio active isotopes splitting it takes a couple of min to appear. This isotope is NOT radio active, but is really good at absorbing neutrons. Once it absorbs the neutron, it becomes radio active and proceeds to decay.
The net effect here is that when you have a constant power draw from a nuclear core, the xenon is "burned off" by the neutron flux as it appears. All is well as long as you keep a constant power setting and there is a balance between the xenon and the neutron flux in the core. The problem is when you throttle down which means you cut the neutron flux by inserting the control rods, but the xenon production remains at a high level for a number of min after the throttling event, which will further increase the neutron absorption within the core and will cause the nuclear reaction to be further diminished. There comes a point where this affect is beyond the operator's ability to overcome by adjusting the control rods and even a small throttling of the nuclear reaction can lead to an uncontrollable complete shutdown. This is most true near the end of the fuel cycle, when the fuel has a lot of waste products to absorb neutrons and not as much fuel to absorb them and sustain a chain reaction.
This affect means the nuclear power plants really don't respond well to throttling. In order to get the most from your fuel, you want to have long steady power levels and avoid making short term changes in your power output. Nuclear plants are thus most efficient when their power out put is very steady for long periods and when throttling down is done very slowly over weeks/months, which doesn't match the power grid's daily/weekly cycles up and down.
Spool up what plant? A fossil fueled one? Even a natural gas steam turbine plant takes hours to go from a cold start to producing electricity. Coal plants generally take longer. The only thing that approaches "instant on" is a standard diesel plant which can go from not running to pushing energy in under 10 min but they are woefully inefficient, produce significant pollution during their start up and are generally unreliable things which require lots of maintenance (and are thus expensive, even when you don't use them).
No, cost efficiency demands that we be ready to back fill the renewables when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining with some kind of fossil fueled "rotating standby" over what you suggest. At least for now, where we expect the grid to be nearly 100% available and have loads of infrastructure designed and deployed assuming electric power is nearly always there. Wind and solar are, at best, just an unreliable source of energy which can cut down on fossil fuel use, but never replace it.
You mean you don't take the time to dissemble the drive, remove the platters and dissolve the magnetic coating in acid? You poor soul.... Personally, I'm content to erase the drive by doing a low level format, but hey, I love to live dangerously given that this won't touch any "bad blocks" replaced by the drive controller....
Really, does this surprise anybody?
I'm not surprised in the least. It's hard for folks who barely know how to plug something in and turn it on to comprehend how dangerous the information on that hard drive really is, even if you have deleted all the files you think are important. How many people know (or would care if they did) how the file system on their laptop actually works, that deleted files are NOT gone yet, or that cluster tips and system save/restore and crash dumps can carry a wealth of information even if you have run a multi-pass overwrite program? Very few.
Well, if there is anything good to come from the Hillary E-mail server thing is perhaps the common man will start to realize that they need to be careful to "wipe" (and not just with a cloth) their electronics clean, and deleting something doesn't mean it's gone, only that it's not as easy to find. Heaven help us when folks start to realize that "the cloud" only makes this whole data security thing that much harder, because now you cannot even physically disassemble the device and erase your data that way...
Or nuclear.
Not really. Not only must power be generated when it's needed, you must not generate more than is necessary or the grid will drift off frequency and voltage and shut down, being unstable. This means you must be ready to throttle up and down your generation capacity to exactly match demand.
Nuclear has issues throttling up and down, especially when you are near the end of your fuel cycle. The difference between off peak and peak demand is an order of magnitude at times. Nuclear is great for background load, say about 10-25% of peak, but unless you have a place to shunt off a LOT of power in the middle of the night, nuclear isn't a viable backup option because you cannot throttle it down. At least for the nuclear power technology we currently have in the USA. There are some reactor designs that are a bit more flexible in their fuel cycles, but they are not generally deployed for power generation in the USA.
Nuclear helps, but it's not the solution to the on again off again nature of solar and wind power problem. There are three solutions we use for peak load capacity now, hydro-electric, geo-thermal, and fossil fuels. The first two are severely limited in long term capacity leaving the third as really the only viable and economically sustainable solution we have.
Maybe Fusion will come along and help us out in the next few decades, but until then, fossil fuels is what we really have to fall back on.
It's only got to over run your storage capacity ONCE to be a problem so YES it's that bad.
Folks need to remember that electrical power must be generated the instant it's used and that using batteries to "smooth out the load" is wildly inefficient when done on an industrial scale. We depend on the grid ALWAYS being on and until we get away from that, Solar and Wind are only secondary supplies.
THAT's how you do security . . .
Well, it's a start anyway.... That they turned off the debugging information was also a step in the right direction too...
Unless there's DB credentials or other sensitive information in it.
DB credentials In the SOURCE code? security: FAIL.
You NEVER put the DB credentials in the source, nor do you put things like internal IP's or hostnames. NEVER EVER. At the very least you put stuff like this in separately maintained configuration files. If you are wanting real security then you encrypt said files and provide the decryption key upon system startup. Just putting in plain text credentials is akin to hard coding SQL statements and other such foolish things I've seen folks do. If you have a database, go ask your DBA (you have a DBA right?) how to properly use the thing. If you don't have a DBA, go get one. Cannot afford a DBA? Get another job where they know how to spend their money properly...
They're very reliable. Whenever the sun shines or the wind blows, they work.
The word you're looking for is "intermittent" and that's an entirely different (and already solved) problem.
Already solved? Do tell... How has this problem been solved? Beyond just building fossil fueled plants to make up the difference between supply and demand when the sun don't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
Look, Solar is only going to work, at best, half of the day. Wind power is only good for about 25% of forecast capacity because our ability to tell when and how hard the wind will blow is pretty poor. That leaves us with a significant amount of capacity which must be on standby or we load we can easily shed or we risk the grid going down. Trust me, you don't' want the grid going down and rolling blackouts are messy and dangerous.
BTW... Don't give me this Musk - "We will use batteries!" - idea either. Batteries are hugely expensive to produce and use and are an environmental nightmare when you consider the production, use and recycling process required. Charging and discharging batteries is hugely inefficient and will require we build out our wind and solar capacity to many times the average load or risk running out of power. In fact, ALL methods of storing electrical power on an industrial scale are hugely inefficient and generally environmentally messy.
Where I'm all for using solar where the sun shines and wind where it's blowing, we all need to realize that these two power sources will NEVER replace our current generation capacity and we will need fossil fuels well into the future. Wind and Solar suffer from not being available at irregular times and batteries are not a viable solution for the problem on the industrial scales necessary.
They are building custom hardware and a lot of it so they get a bit of special treatment from Intel.
You engineer the thermal paths and better control how you get rid of heat. You tweak the board layout for the best performance of the chipset and CPU and run closer tolerances on voltages and clock frequencies while keeping it small. Buying in bulk also lets you customize the chipset and CPU packaging to get you better performance/watt and higher density by eliminating all the "fluff" stuff you really don't want on the cloud machine. Who needs all those USB controllers, PCI-e busses, and sound cards you find in your average server chassis in a high density server farm that just take up space and suck power? Just give me a couple of NIC's, a SATA connection and a serial console and a way to reset an individual system and I have what I need to stand up an OS and grant somebody external access to it.
Where is that in the constitution?
Not there? Then it's up to the states who grant their charter.. I'm guessing few states will sign up for this for fear of running off business and economic activity to tax and the ones that would, are in serious trouble with businesses departing for greener pastures anyway (Here's looking at YOU CA and IL).
Oh sure... The only difference is that if the US company get's in too much trouble, the company just heads to bankruptcy court and reorganizes. If it's bad enough and the company has Union workers, the UAW will demand and get a government funded bail out of said company to keep the union membership employed under the guise of being "too big to fail"....
Exactly. If VW was faking their emissions tests for 6 years, you can bet there is a bunch of people who thought about this too. Some will have yielded to temptation...
I don't agree, many of the problems are exactly or nearly exactly the same, many are worse on the moon, few are better. The advantage of the moon is that it's CHEAPER by virtue of being closer, has some gravity and would serve as a jumping off point for additional research of the moon which has value of it's own. The "unique" parts of the Mars environment could easily be replicated on the ground (or on the moon) as necessary to prove the technology is adaptable, but there is nothing that can replace real experience using a technology when you are dependent on it and far away from help.
But.... Hey, you are entitled to your opinion... I just think you are wrong in this case.
Then why go to Mars in the first place? Pick something else.
We've already established that it's NOT habitable and there is no point in being on Mars... Seriously... (sarcasm) Just aim yourself at the nearest star beyond ours and go have a look... Oh, we are not ready for that yet? Hmmm... Might it be just a bit to distant for us right now? Ok, just head to one of Saturn's moons with you proposed colony... Think big man.... (/sarcasm)
So you see no value in staying close to home and working out the bulk of our problems.... Ok...I think a crawl, walk, run progression is useful here, you apparently don't. I see some possible advantages to being on the moon, you apparently don't.
What now? Shall we settle this with a duel come high noon?
Not exactly...
Cars really ARE a low margin business where the possible sales volume is pretty low and the produce is very expensive. Cell phones are generally not the same kind of business, margins are pretty high per unit and the volume is a couple of times that of a cars.
In Q1 of 2014 it is estimated that just Apple sold over 60 million phones, during which the auto industry struggled to sell 10 million units industry wide. This makes the production rate of iPhones an order of magnitude higher than the entire auto industry's unit production.
Margins in cars are *extremely* low, especially given the huge NRE costs that get spread across 1/10th of the units. Building a car is a *huge* and complex undertaking which requires huge amounts of space, very expensive tooling and long supply chains. Automobiles require huge investments in materials and inventory over long terms because it takes a long time from when you start building a car to when it's paid for by the customer.
Cell phones are different. Building and assembly of the hardware is fairly easy and doesn't require huge amounts of space for the tooling or parts storage. You are spreading the NRE across 10X the number of units and the "industrial engineering" portion of the NRE is a LOT smaller for a cell phone. The logistics are easier, the device is smaller and it has a fewer parts by a long shot.
So, where Apple does have the $$ to do anything it wants, including taking over the automobile industry if they wanted, the critique of Apple by automobile experts is valid. It's just that Apple could afford to BUY any expertise it needed to make it work if it chooses to.
take care of your stuff and it will last
Not that iPhone thing in your pocket... You can bet Apple will make a better iOS release that makes that shiny new toy run like a tired worn out dog in about 3 years. It may not be worn out, it's just no longer usable for the new software load with the wiz bang shiny new features that everybody wants.
Of course you can go like me, running that Windows CE device into the ground and finally giving up on it after 7 years... But folks are going to call you a luddite for sure...