Out of three OCZ drives I have had two failures within the first two weeks of use.
Last Friday my 2-week old work machine with an "enterprise class" OCZ hard drive hooked up to a Dell server with an LSI raid controller suddenly started corrupting the EXT4 filesystem all to hell rendering the machine unbootable. I had days worth of work on that machine. Fortunately I was able to recover the data from lost+found after fsck.ext4 but the root directory was totally lost along with who knows what other data.
At home I have two OCZ hard drives. One of them turned into a brick after two weeks of use. I got a replacement from OCZ and make sure I do an XFS dump every night onto my RAID drives.
Last week I lost an entire day due to an enterprise class OCZ drive that decided to corrupt itself. My Linux box (using EXT4) started suddenly developing all sorts of filesystem errors rendering the system unbootable. The machine was two weeks old and had been used for software development. I also had another OCZ drive suddenly fail after two weeks where the drive turned into a brick. Reading up online on the new drive returned many reports of corrupt data from an "enterprise" class drive.
Who cares how fast you can access the drive if the drive can turn into/dev/random or/dev/null without warning.
Wordstar never had a problem supporting large documents. Back in the day I ran Wordstar on a Heathkit H89 CPM computer with 64K of RAM. I used Wordstar for many years and was glad that Borland adopted the same keystrokes in their editors.
I remember there was a tool that let you hack Wordstar, letting you insert your own printer control codes and even assembly language into it. I hacked it to make it support a 100x50 text mode or something along those lines and added support for some of the alternate fonts my printer supported. I used Wordstar long past when everyone else moved on.
The third link is probably the best one. It is a report from the Seattle fire department which you give no credibility to where a firefighter was almost killed when a CNG Honda Civic exploded. The tank was blown 95 feet from the vehicle which was completely destroyed, turned into an almost unrecognizable twisted piece of scrap metal. Shrapnel was blown 100' in all directions including on an overpass above the incident. The rear bumper frame was blown 90 feet away from the car.
The bus is another good example. If it had been a diesel or gasoline powered vehicle the results would have been far less interesting. If the bus were next to some other structure then the results would be far worse (think downtown Manhattan, San Francisco or any other big city).
When a lot of these vehicles age they will leak and they will catch fire but the results are far worse than a gasoline or diesel car catching fire. I have some personal experience with this. My father has an old LPG powered vehicle. On a couple of occasions it had developed leaks which required airing out the garage after making sure the tank was empty in order to repair it. LPG is far easier to handle than CNG or hydrogen since the pressures involved are far lower. In this case the leaks were relatively slow.
Fires are caused by many reasons other than fuel, including electrical fires and arson. If the tank heats up the gas expands and has to go somewhere. In the case of the bus a valve opened to vent it. In the case of the Civic it just exploded.
The video from Iran is also what one could expect if joe-public were dealing with poorly maintained aging CNG or hydrogen cars.
Unlike natural gas, hydrogen rises so if the vehicle is in an enclosed space when it leaks it requires a far smaller leak than say methane which will evenly diffuse through the atmosphere. Also, natural gas has an odorant to alert people of its presence. You can't do that with hydrogen. Hydrogen is far more likely to leak than CNG and in fact is often used in testing seals for leaks since it will seep through any crack or opening. CNG tanks are also kept at a lower pressure than what is required for hydrogen since hydrogen has such poor energy density compared to CNG (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... ).
Gasoline and diesel are fairly tame. Gasoline cars don't explode, even if you torch the gas tank. Gasoline requires a very limited set of conditions in order to detonate. Hydrogen has a much wider window of mixtures with which it will burn and detonate. It will burn with anywhere from 4 to 74% concentrations, one of the widest ranges of any gas. It burns extremely hot with a nearly invisible flame.
As for the Tesla fires, those are basically a non-issue and the chance of a fire has since been minimized (see http://www.teslamotors.com/blo... ). A battery is simply incapable of exploding and the fires were all rather slow burning. The interior of the vehicles was never burned and in all cases the cause was due to a collision with a rather sizeable object, the last being that the car went 110MPH through a concrete wall and hit several trees. Everyone walked away without serious injury. Compare this to the gasoline car fire I saw a year ago that took place, ironically enough, on the side of the freeway in front of the Tesla factor
B) I can refuel my EV in my garage. Every morning I have a full battery. Most of the time I spend less time "refueling" my tesla than most people spend at a gas station (5 seconds to plug in at night and 5 seconds to unplug in the morning, I've timed it). Fast charging makes long trips quite doable. As for the charge/discharge limit, the Tesla battery is rated for 3000 charge/discharge cycles while still maintaining 70-80% capacity. That works out to 600,000 miles if I assume only 200 miles of range per full charge (EPA says 265 and I easily get at least 240 with my inefficient sticky tires).
C) What recycling issues? There are already programs in place to recycle lithium batteries.
D) The HFC membrane breaks down over time and is very costly since it contains platinum.
E) Most of that "lost" energy comes back when the batteries warm back up.
Then there are all the downsides of hydrogen: 1. Hydrogen is explosive when mixed with air between 4 and 74%. Safety is a major concern. The argument has been made that the risk is low because hydrogen rises in the air. This is true if the vehicle is parked outdoors, but many times vehicles are parked in parking structures or garages. The hydrogen will pool at the highest point. It only takes 4% hydrogen in air for it to be explosive. 2. Hydrogen can be ignited by sunlight and requires extremely little energy to ignite. 3. Hydrogen embrittles metals. It also leaks through the tiniest of gaps. It diffuses through metal. 4. It takes 20% of the energy contained in the hydrogen just to compress it for refueling. Liquifying it is not feasible due to the extreme amount of energy needed to cryogenically cool it and keep it from boiling off. 5. Most hydrogen is generated through steam reforming of methane, a process that is at best around 70% effecient. 6. Hydrogen will rise if it leaks, in any enclosed environment, i.e. a garage or other structure, this makes it extremely dangerous. You cannot add an odorant like you can natural gas since it will foul the PEM in the HFC. 7. The membrane of the HFC wears out over time and is very expensive since it relies on platinum. 8. HFCs must never be subjected to freezing or they will be destroyed. 9. The cost of a hydrogen fueling station is very expensive and likely will never be allowed to be done at ones home due to safety issues. There is a hydrogen filling station for buses in my county that has already experienced one fire. Hydrogen will generally have to be generated on site. (see 10) 10. It is not economically feasible to transport hydrogen for filling vehicles in trucks because the energy density of hydrogen is so low and the tanks for storing it will need to be quite heavy. 11. Existing pipelines cannot be used for transporting hydrogen (see 3). 12. HFCs are at best less than 70% efficient. 13. The cost of hydrogen will not be competitive with fossile fuels for a very long time.
The only advantage a HFC vehicle has over a BEV is that it can be refueled quickly. The problem is that you still have to frequently go to the filling station to refill it. A BEV can be charged at night in the garage where the time to recharge is no longer an issue.
BEVs make a lot more sense in most cases. A charging station can be built any place electricity is available and can be quite cheap (for a non-fast charger). Maintenance and overhead is also quite low.
Now it looks like you might just be better off burning the natural gas or diesel than running a HFC vehicle.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/... has some good arguments about hydrogen. Though some elements have been improved since it was written, like new techniques for electrolysis and more efficient and cheaper HFCs much of it still applies.
I have read from many sources that there is plenty of available lithium from known reserves right now. Lithium batteries are only around 2-3% lithium. Also, all of those batteries are recyclable and they're always finding more lithium supplies.
I recently drove a Chevy Spark. The car has no spark. It's one of the worst cars I've ever driven and I'm comparing it to the beaters I drove in college. The seat was extremely uncomfortable (even though it had plenty of head room). It struggled on the freeway, it's not a car you'll speed in because it has enough trouble going 65MPh. The guages are a clusterfuck of how not to design things.
As a Tesla owner I can say that electric-only cars are great as long as you're not always driving 300+ miles in a stretch. Every morning I have a full battery. When I plug in in my garage I add around 55 miles of range per hour. On long trips the superchargers have been great. In my trips between the Bay Area and Lake Tahoe/Reno I stop in Folsom and grab a burger. By the time I'm done with my burger my car has plenty of charge to reach my destination, usually around 30 minutes after 2 hours of driving (I need a good charge since my destination in Lake Tahoe is 7200 feet and the pass to Reno is around 5K feet). Soon battery swapping will be an option as well. The Tesla battery still holds 80% capacity at the equivalent of 750K miles.
Do you know how much energy it takes to liquifty hydrogen and how cold it has to be maintained at? It's not like freezing water. It is simply not cost effective. You would use as much energy just liquifying it as it contains.
The problem with hydrogen is not just electrolysis being 80%. You lose another 20% just compressing the hydrogen. Then comes safety. Hydrogen leaks and tends to rise so parking a hydrogen vehicle indoors (i.e. a garage) is not safe. It is explosive under an extremely high range of mixtures. It burns with a nearly invisible flame. It can spontaneously combust. It embrittles metal. Unlike CNG you can't just add an odorant either since it will foul the fuel cell.
There is a hydrogen filling station in my local county for filling experimental HFC buses. They've already had one fire at the facility which is not used by the general public.
Hydrogen filling stations are also going to be far more expensive than gasoline stations. The equipment to generate hydrogen is very expensive. You can't transport hydrogen in the quantity needed by truck in a cost effective manner unlike gasoline and diesel and existing pipelines cannot be used due to embrittlement.
Look at how hard it is to stop all these gasoline engine fires. There's dozens every day. Gasoline doesn't spontaneously combust and requires a good spark or heat source to ignite it. It also is not explosive except under a rather limited range of mixtures. If hydrogen starts leaking in a garage it won't slowly combust like gasoline tends to do, if it ignites it will likely explode. With all those poorly maintained vehicles on the road how do you think things will fare with hydrogen? Unlike a gasoline car which only explodes in Hollywood movies, hydrogen is extremely explosive at a mixture between 4 and 74% in air. It will rise so it if leaks in an enclosed space it will rise to the ceiling. Hydrogen requires extremely little energy to ignight. It can spontaneously ignight from a leak or be ignited by sunlight.
Fuel cells are also only 42-53% efficient. Combine that with the losses from compressing the hydrogen (20% loss) and creating the hydrogen (25% loss under the best case). Also, almost all hydrogen manufactured today comes from natural gas and at least 20% is lost due to the endothermic reaction. You then have the same losses you would have with an electric vehicle and the losses of a battery, since HFC vehicles also need a battery for regenerative braking and to handle acceleration since the HFC will likely not handle peak load.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/... While some things have improved since it was written, others have not and are limited by the laws of physics.
Politicians won't sell a solution because their contributors don't want them to. (i.e. coal, natural gas and petroleum industries). Politicians answer to their campaign contributors, not the voters. There, fixed it for you.
Storing power is well understood. There are many ways for grid storage, such as molten metal batteries or if building a moltan salt solar plant all that heat can continue to be used at night when the load is typically a lot lower.
Hell, the battery in my car could easily power numerous houses overnight (85KWh) in my area. The problem is that the government has not made any significant investment into green energy or for that matter any new energy generation methods. Other green methods are geothermal and wind, where there are large parts of the US that could supply a significant amount of power and things like gothermal are great for baseline and there are areas of the US that have very steady wind supplies.
We could be building thorium reactors using that U238 they want to bury. We could be investing a lot more in fusion research. The big complaint comes from what about all those jobs for the coal minors and crap like that.
The stupid politicians so in bed with the fossile fuel industry it isn't funny. They'll believe whatever their contributors want them to believe, voters be damned. Look how much the coal and oil industry contribute to campaigns.
As for needing a reference, it takes typing "108 square mile solar" into google to get multiple references.
It's not really in question any more if it is caused by man or not, since most scientists agree that it is, and the whole global cooling thing was never taken seriously. The basic science behind global warming has been understood for nearly a century (i.e carbon dioxide) and it's pretty clear that the vast majority of it comes from burning fossile fuels.
The problem is that we're like a bunch of frogs dumped in a pot with the heat turned on high.
Actually OS/2 WARP and even 2.1 included TCP/IP. The OS/2 Warp TCP/IP suite was far better than anything Microsoft had. It was basically based on BSD along with many of the tools that were supplied. I remember buying NFS for OS/2 (there were versions from IBM and Hummingbird) as well as X11 for OS/2 (before XFree86 was ported to it). Later versions of OS/2 included even more features from BSD, including sendmail and the firewall support. I remember being able to telnet into my OS/2 box long before such things were supported by Microsoft. When OS/2 Warp shipped, TCP/IP was an add-on for Windows 95.
TCP/IP was never a 20-30K option at least from version 2.1 and later.
California has this too. One of the best ones was one that gets rid of Gerrymandering. The process was quite open and the rules rather strict as to how the districts could be drawn. It also included input from the public. As such, it helps the moderates. As a result, the republican party lost big time because they could no longer cherry pick their districts. Things would be quite different on a national scale if this were to take place in other states.
One way is to increase the price on the car registration based on the weight of the vehicle since road damage is directly proportional to the weight of the vehicle. I drive a Tesla and have no problem with that. Another alternative is to add a tax on the electricity used to charge the car, though this is more difficult since most people do not have a separate meter for their EV. Another alternative is to tax based on the mileage driven within the state. For most EVs that's easy since it's almost impossible to drive them any significant distance. With any car with a GPS a software update could keep track of how many miles are driven in each state without recording where in the state.
Adding a module to keep track of mileage driven within a state should be quite inexpensive given how cheap GSP modules are these days. All the module would need to do is keep track of the number of miles driven within the state it's registered in so there's not much information given out in terms of privacy. Another method is for a state to query the car's mileage with RFID whenever it enters or leaves the state like the toll road/bridge passes and have the owner report the current mileage when renewing their registration.
Given how bad the roads are in my area I would gladly pay more taxes to maintain the roads.
There is nothing wrong per-se with debt funded growth as long as the risks are properly accounted for. For example, a year ago I bought a new car. While I could have paid cash for it it made much more sense to finance a large part of it since interest rates are so low and invest what was not spent. As long as the investment is beating the low interest rate I'm ahead. Now it's pretty easy to beat a 1.99% interest rate. Now the problem comes if that investment fails and the source of income to pay off that debt fails. In my case my investments are well diversified so even if something like what happened in 2008 occurs I will still be ahead.
The problem as I see it is when people get too greedy and things get too risky so that everything collapses if things don't go according to plan. I fault that on the loose lending practices of the bankers and the repeal of Glass-Steagall which to this day has not been addressed. It's like what happened in the 1920s where speculators were buying stock on margin with only the stock backing it up. In 2008 it was the same thing but with real estate.
In the case of the United States, it could start paying down its debt any time it wanted to by raising some taxes, especially on those at the top who are finding good ways to hide their assets in various offshore accounts. Changing how corporations are taxed would also help a lot, especially reducing taxes on the small businesses and closing all the loopholes that large corporations like Apple, GE and Google use to avoid paying taxes. Adding a very small tax to each stock transaction would also go a long way towards adding stability to the markets which are being gamed.
Social Security could be fixed just by removing the cap, which is basically a tax cut at those earning above the cap.
Sadly I don't see any progress being made, especially with the republicans who fight tooth and nail over any reforms no matter how badly they're needed.
Do they ban bears, birds, deer, etc? Just because there's no humans doesn't mean that there isn't poop and stuff in the water. Also, what about fish? I'm sure that the fish poop and have sex in the water.
Actually it does. According to this thread http://www.teslamotors.com/for... Tesla will replace it if the capacity drops below 70%. People have already hit 75,000 miles and are reporting only a few % loss in capacity.
Usually it's the cathode that degrades with time. The hardest thing on a lithium ion battery is charging it to 100% and discharging it to 0%. All of the materials are recyclable. See http://www.mecheng.osu.edu/nlb...
I decided to skip the $12K pre-paid battery replacement. I took some of that money and bought Tesla stock at $35. I'm kicking myself for not buying more stock than I did, but it will have more than paid for a new battery. I too got a loan from my credit union for 1.99% instead of the 2.99% Tesla loan (which was not available when I got my car).
It's the first time I financed a car. It's one of the best decisions I've made since all I have to do is do better than 1.99% and I'm ahead.
I must say that in my Tesla P85 it's a lot of fun doing 0-60 and it gets rather addictive the way it quietly punches you back in the seat like a rocket. I got used to my Prius which was around 10.5 seconds 0-60. It was also a nice car to drive, though for other reasons. You didn't buy it for the handling and acceleration, though I did take it on some rather twisty roads and steep grades at times.
In this case the battery swap is handled at the charging station. It's unmanned so it's unlikely to be closed. If they're out of batteries you can just charge and it's unlikely the grid will run out of power.
The other thing is that you are expected to always pick up your battery on the return trip or you will get charged the difference in value.
You have a choice of either paying for a battery swap or charging for free. It will be interesting to see how the swap stations work out since it's time vs money.
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Out of three OCZ drives I have had two failures within the first two weeks of use.
Last Friday my 2-week old work machine with an "enterprise class" OCZ hard drive hooked up to a Dell server with an LSI raid controller suddenly started corrupting the EXT4 filesystem all to hell rendering the machine unbootable. I had days worth of work on that machine. Fortunately I was able to recover the data from lost+found after fsck.ext4 but the root directory was totally lost along with who knows what other data.
At home I have two OCZ hard drives. One of them turned into a brick after two weeks of use. I got a replacement from OCZ and make sure I do an XFS dump every night onto my RAID drives.
Last week I lost an entire day due to an enterprise class OCZ drive that decided to corrupt itself. My Linux box (using EXT4) started suddenly developing all sorts of filesystem errors rendering the system unbootable. The machine was two weeks old and had been used for software development. I also had another OCZ drive suddenly fail after two weeks where the drive turned into a brick. Reading up online on the new drive returned many reports of corrupt data from an "enterprise" class drive.
Who cares how fast you can access the drive if the drive can turn into /dev/random or /dev/null without warning.
Wordstar never had a problem supporting large documents. Back in the day I ran Wordstar on a Heathkit H89 CPM computer with 64K of RAM. I used Wordstar for many years and was glad that Borland adopted the same keystrokes in their editors.
I remember there was a tool that let you hack Wordstar, letting you insert your own printer control codes and even assembly language into it. I hacked it to make it support a 100x50 text mode or something along those lines and added support for some of the alternate fonts my printer supported. I used Wordstar long past when everyone else moved on.
I now use Libre Office.
There has been, like fuel cells that use methanol but again they need hydrocarbons for the hydrogen and they're not as efficient I believe.
The third link is probably the best one. It is a report from the Seattle fire department which you give no credibility to where a firefighter was almost killed when a CNG Honda Civic exploded. The tank was blown 95 feet from the vehicle which was completely destroyed, turned into an almost unrecognizable twisted piece of scrap metal. Shrapnel was blown 100' in all directions including on an overpass above the incident. The rear bumper frame was blown 90 feet away from the car.
The bus is another good example. If it had been a diesel or gasoline powered vehicle the results would have been far less interesting. If the bus were next to some other structure then the results would be far worse (think downtown Manhattan, San Francisco or any other big city).
Unlike natural gas and most gases, hydrogen actually heats up when it leaks and can spontaneously combust due to the negative Joule-Thomson coefficient (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J... ). It takes very little energy to ignite it such that it can ignite from even sunlight ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... ).
When a lot of these vehicles age they will leak and they will catch fire but the results are far worse than a gasoline or diesel car catching fire. I have some personal experience with this. My father has an old LPG powered vehicle. On a couple of occasions it had developed leaks which required airing out the garage after making sure the tank was empty in order to repair it. LPG is far easier to handle than CNG or hydrogen since the pressures involved are far lower. In this case the leaks were relatively slow.
Fires are caused by many reasons other than fuel, including electrical fires and arson. If the tank heats up the gas expands and has to go somewhere. In the case of the bus a valve opened to vent it. In the case of the Civic it just exploded.
The video from Iran is also what one could expect if joe-public were dealing with poorly maintained aging CNG or hydrogen cars.
Unlike natural gas, hydrogen rises so if the vehicle is in an enclosed space when it leaks it requires a far smaller leak than say methane which will evenly diffuse through the atmosphere. Also, natural gas has an odorant to alert people of its presence. You can't do that with hydrogen. Hydrogen is far more likely to leak than CNG and in fact is often used in testing seals for leaks since it will seep through any crack or opening. CNG tanks are also kept at a lower pressure than what is required for hydrogen since hydrogen has such poor energy density compared to CNG (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... ).
Gasoline and diesel are fairly tame. Gasoline cars don't explode, even if you torch the gas tank. Gasoline requires a very limited set of conditions in order to detonate. Hydrogen has a much wider window of mixtures with which it will burn and detonate. It will burn with anywhere from 4 to 74% concentrations, one of the widest ranges of any gas. It burns extremely hot with a nearly invisible flame.
As for the Tesla fires, those are basically a non-issue and the chance of a fire has since been minimized (see http://www.teslamotors.com/blo... ). A battery is simply incapable of exploding and the fires were all rather slow burning. The interior of the vehicles was never burned and in all cases the cause was due to a collision with a rather sizeable object, the last being that the car went 110MPH through a concrete wall and hit several trees. Everyone walked away without serious injury. Compare this to the gasoline car fire I saw a year ago that took place, ironically enough, on the side of the freeway in front of the Tesla factor
So does much of our electricity, especially now that NG is cheaper than coal.
B) I can refuel my EV in my garage. Every morning I have a full battery. Most of the time I spend less time "refueling" my tesla than most people spend at a gas station (5 seconds to plug in at night and 5 seconds to unplug in the morning, I've timed it). Fast charging makes long trips quite doable. As for the charge/discharge limit, the Tesla battery is rated for 3000 charge/discharge cycles while still maintaining 70-80% capacity. That works out to 600,000 miles if I assume only 200 miles of range per full charge (EPA says 265 and I easily get at least 240 with my inefficient sticky tires).
C) What recycling issues? There are already programs in place to recycle lithium batteries.
D) The HFC membrane breaks down over time and is very costly since it contains platinum.
E) Most of that "lost" energy comes back when the batteries warm back up.
Then there are all the downsides of hydrogen:
1. Hydrogen is explosive when mixed with air between 4 and 74%. Safety is a major concern. The argument has been made that the risk is low because hydrogen rises in the air. This is true if the vehicle is parked outdoors, but many times vehicles are parked in parking structures or garages. The hydrogen will pool at the highest point. It only takes 4% hydrogen in air for it to be explosive.
2. Hydrogen can be ignited by sunlight and requires extremely little energy to ignite.
3. Hydrogen embrittles metals. It also leaks through the tiniest of gaps. It diffuses through metal.
4. It takes 20% of the energy contained in the hydrogen just to compress it for refueling. Liquifying it is not feasible due to the extreme amount of energy needed to cryogenically cool it and keep it from boiling off.
5. Most hydrogen is generated through steam reforming of methane, a process that is at best around 70% effecient.
6. Hydrogen will rise if it leaks, in any enclosed environment, i.e. a garage or other structure, this makes it extremely dangerous. You cannot add an odorant like you can natural gas since it will foul the PEM in the HFC.
7. The membrane of the HFC wears out over time and is very expensive since it relies on platinum.
8. HFCs must never be subjected to freezing or they will be destroyed.
9. The cost of a hydrogen fueling station is very expensive and likely will never be allowed to be done at ones home due to safety issues. There is a hydrogen filling station for buses in my county that has already experienced one fire. Hydrogen will generally have to be generated on site. (see 10)
10. It is not economically feasible to transport hydrogen for filling vehicles in trucks because the energy density of hydrogen is so low and the tanks for storing it will need to be quite heavy.
11. Existing pipelines cannot be used for transporting hydrogen (see 3).
12. HFCs are at best less than 70% efficient.
13. The cost of hydrogen will not be competitive with fossile fuels for a very long time.
The only advantage a HFC vehicle has over a BEV is that it can be refueled quickly. The problem is that you still have to frequently go to the filling station to refill it. A BEV can be charged at night in the garage where the time to recharge is no longer an issue.
BEVs make a lot more sense in most cases. A charging station can be built any place electricity is available and can be quite cheap (for a non-fast charger). Maintenance and overhead is also quite low.
Now it looks like you might just be better off burning the natural gas or diesel than running a HFC vehicle.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/... has some good arguments about hydrogen. Though some elements have been improved since it was written, like new techniques for electrolysis and more efficient and cheaper HFCs much of it still applies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
I have read from many sources that there is plenty of available lithium from known reserves right now. Lithium batteries are only around 2-3% lithium. Also, all of those batteries are recyclable and they're always finding more lithium supplies.
I recently drove a Chevy Spark. The car has no spark. It's one of the worst cars I've ever driven and I'm comparing it to the beaters I drove in college. The seat was extremely uncomfortable (even though it had plenty of head room). It struggled on the freeway, it's not a car you'll speed in because it has enough trouble going 65MPh. The guages are a clusterfuck of how not to design things.
You forgot the oblitory links:
http://the-tubez.prochan.com/T...
http://www.autoblog.com/2013/0...
http://www.co.benton.ar.us/med...
As a Tesla owner I can say that electric-only cars are great as long as you're not always driving 300+ miles in a stretch. Every morning I have a full battery. When I plug in in my garage I add around 55 miles of range per hour. On long trips the superchargers have been great. In my trips between the Bay Area and Lake Tahoe/Reno I stop in Folsom and grab a burger. By the time I'm done with my burger my car has plenty of charge to reach my destination, usually around 30 minutes after 2 hours of driving (I need a good charge since my destination in Lake Tahoe is 7200 feet and the pass to Reno is around 5K feet). Soon battery swapping will be an option as well. The Tesla battery still holds 80% capacity at the equivalent of 750K miles.
Do you know how much energy it takes to liquifty hydrogen and how cold it has to be maintained at? It's not like freezing water. It is simply not cost effective. You would use as much energy just liquifying it as it contains.
The problem with hydrogen is not just electrolysis being 80%. You lose another 20% just compressing the hydrogen. Then comes safety. Hydrogen leaks and tends to rise so parking a hydrogen vehicle indoors (i.e. a garage) is not safe. It is explosive under an extremely high range of mixtures. It burns with a nearly invisible flame. It can spontaneously combust. It embrittles metal. Unlike CNG you can't just add an odorant either since it will foul the fuel cell.
There is a hydrogen filling station in my local county for filling experimental HFC buses. They've already had one fire at the facility which is not used by the general public.
Hydrogen filling stations are also going to be far more expensive than gasoline stations. The equipment to generate hydrogen is very expensive. You can't transport hydrogen in the quantity needed by truck in a cost effective manner unlike gasoline and diesel and existing pipelines cannot be used due to embrittlement.
Look at how hard it is to stop all these gasoline engine fires. There's dozens every day. Gasoline doesn't spontaneously combust and requires a good spark or heat source to ignite it. It also is not explosive except under a rather limited range of mixtures. If hydrogen starts leaking in a garage it won't slowly combust like gasoline tends to do, if it ignites it will likely explode. With all those poorly maintained vehicles on the road how do you think things will fare with hydrogen? Unlike a gasoline car which only explodes in Hollywood movies, hydrogen is extremely explosive at a mixture between 4 and 74% in air. It will rise so it if leaks in an enclosed space it will rise to the ceiling. Hydrogen requires extremely little energy to ignight. It can spontaneously ignight from a leak or be ignited by sunlight.
Fuel cells are also only 42-53% efficient. Combine that with the losses from compressing the hydrogen (20% loss) and creating the hydrogen (25% loss under the best case). Also, almost all hydrogen manufactured today comes from natural gas and at least 20% is lost due to the endothermic reaction. You then have the same losses you would have with an electric vehicle and the losses of a battery, since HFC vehicles also need a battery for regenerative braking and to handle acceleration since the HFC will likely not handle peak load.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/...
While some things have improved since it was written, others have not and are limited by the laws of physics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Politicians won't sell a solution because their contributors don't want them to. (i.e. coal, natural gas and petroleum industries). Politicians answer to their campaign contributors, not the voters. There, fixed it for you.
Storing power is well understood. There are many ways for grid storage, such as molten metal batteries or if building a moltan salt solar plant all that heat can continue to be used at night when the load is typically a lot lower.
Hell, the battery in my car could easily power numerous houses overnight (85KWh) in my area. The problem is that the government has not made any significant investment into green energy or for that matter any new energy generation methods. Other green methods are geothermal and wind, where there are large parts of the US that could supply a significant amount of power and things like gothermal are great for baseline and there are areas of the US that have very steady wind supplies.
We could be building thorium reactors using that U238 they want to bury. We could be investing a lot more in fusion research. The big complaint comes from what about all those jobs for the coal minors and crap like that.
The stupid politicians so in bed with the fossile fuel industry it isn't funny. They'll believe whatever their contributors want them to believe, voters be damned. Look how much the coal and oil industry contribute to campaigns.
As for needing a reference, it takes typing "108 square mile solar" into google to get multiple references.
It's not really in question any more if it is caused by man or not, since most scientists agree that it is, and the whole global cooling thing was never taken seriously. The basic science behind global warming has been understood for nearly a century (i.e carbon dioxide) and it's pretty clear that the vast majority of it comes from burning fossile fuels.
The problem is that we're like a bunch of frogs dumped in a pot with the heat turned on high.
Actually OS/2 WARP and even 2.1 included TCP/IP. The OS/2 Warp TCP/IP suite was far better than anything Microsoft had. It was basically based on BSD along with many of the tools that were supplied. I remember buying NFS for OS/2 (there were versions from IBM and Hummingbird) as well as X11 for OS/2 (before XFree86 was ported to it). Later versions of OS/2 included even more features from BSD, including sendmail and the firewall support. I remember being able to telnet into my OS/2 box long before such things were supported by Microsoft. When OS/2 Warp shipped, TCP/IP was an add-on for Windows 95.
TCP/IP was never a 20-30K option at least from version 2.1 and later.
California has this too. One of the best ones was one that gets rid of Gerrymandering. The process was quite open and the rules rather strict as to how the districts could be drawn. It also included input from the public. As such, it helps the moderates. As a result, the republican party lost big time because they could no longer cherry pick their districts. Things would be quite different on a national scale if this were to take place in other states.
One way is to increase the price on the car registration based on the weight of the vehicle since road damage is directly proportional to the weight of the vehicle. I drive a Tesla and have no problem with that. Another alternative is to add a tax on the electricity used to charge the car, though this is more difficult since most people do not have a separate meter for their EV. Another alternative is to tax based on the mileage driven within the state. For most EVs that's easy since it's almost impossible to drive them any significant distance. With any car with a GPS a software update could keep track of how many miles are driven in each state without recording where in the state.
Adding a module to keep track of mileage driven within a state should be quite inexpensive given how cheap GSP modules are these days. All the module would need to do is keep track of the number of miles driven within the state it's registered in so there's not much information given out in terms of privacy. Another method is for a state to query the car's mileage with RFID whenever it enters or leaves the state like the toll road/bridge passes and have the owner report the current mileage when renewing their registration.
Given how bad the roads are in my area I would gladly pay more taxes to maintain the roads.
There is nothing wrong per-se with debt funded growth as long as the risks are properly accounted for. For example, a year ago I bought a new car. While I could have paid cash for it it made much more sense to finance a large part of it since interest rates are so low and invest what was not spent. As long as the investment is beating the low interest rate I'm ahead. Now it's pretty easy to beat a 1.99% interest rate. Now the problem comes if that investment fails and the source of income to pay off that debt fails. In my case my investments are well diversified so even if something like what happened in 2008 occurs I will still be ahead.
The problem as I see it is when people get too greedy and things get too risky so that everything collapses if things don't go according to plan. I fault that on the loose lending practices of the bankers and the repeal of Glass-Steagall which to this day has not been addressed. It's like what happened in the 1920s where speculators were buying stock on margin with only the stock backing it up. In 2008 it was the same thing but with real estate.
In the case of the United States, it could start paying down its debt any time it wanted to by raising some taxes, especially on those at the top who are finding good ways to hide their assets in various offshore accounts. Changing how corporations are taxed would also help a lot, especially reducing taxes on the small businesses and closing all the loopholes that large corporations like Apple, GE and Google use to avoid paying taxes. Adding a very small tax to each stock transaction would also go a long way towards adding stability to the markets which are being gamed.
Social Security could be fixed just by removing the cap, which is basically a tax cut at those earning above the cap.
Sadly I don't see any progress being made, especially with the republicans who fight tooth and nail over any reforms no matter how badly they're needed.
Do they ban bears, birds, deer, etc? Just because there's no humans doesn't mean that there isn't poop and stuff in the water. Also, what about fish? I'm sure that the fish poop and have sex in the water.
Actually it does. According to this thread http://www.teslamotors.com/for... Tesla will replace it if the capacity drops below 70%. People have already hit 75,000 miles and are reporting only a few % loss in capacity.
Usually it's the cathode that degrades with time. The hardest thing on a lithium ion battery is charging it to 100% and discharging it to 0%. All of the materials are recyclable. See http://www.mecheng.osu.edu/nlb...
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/... discusses how they're recycled.
I decided to skip the $12K pre-paid battery replacement. I took some of that money and bought Tesla stock at $35. I'm kicking myself for not buying more stock than I did, but it will have more than paid for a new battery. I too got a loan from my credit union for 1.99% instead of the 2.99% Tesla loan (which was not available when I got my car).
It's the first time I financed a car. It's one of the best decisions I've made since all I have to do is do better than 1.99% and I'm ahead.
I must say that in my Tesla P85 it's a lot of fun doing 0-60 and it gets rather addictive the way it quietly punches you back in the seat like a rocket. I got used to my Prius which was around 10.5 seconds 0-60. It was also a nice car to drive, though for other reasons. You didn't buy it for the handling and acceleration, though I did take it on some rather twisty roads and steep grades at times.
In this case the battery swap is handled at the charging station. It's unmanned so it's unlikely to be closed. If they're out of batteries you can just charge and it's unlikely the grid will run out of power.
The other thing is that you are expected to always pick up your battery on the return trip or you will get charged the difference in value.
You have a choice of either paying for a battery swap or charging for free. It will be interesting to see how the swap stations work out since it's time vs money.