are you aware that some US homeowners' associations prohibit the use of a washing line
I am aware of that, but those are homeowners associations and thus the power to change the rules lies within the grasp of the owners. If they don't, then those owners are doomed to paying higher energy rates.
[...] (so forcing the use of a dryer)
Whoah, hang on. No one is forcing anyone to live anywhere with silly energy-wasting rules -- they chose it for themselves -- and it's easy to dry clothes indoors, especially during the aforementioned daytime summer hours. If you choose to live in a "community" with such backwards rules, there are surely going to be other problems anyway.
Personally, I think the higher energy prices will (eventually) provide the incentive to overturn the silly rules, possibly en masse with laws that make the rules unenforceable.
People aren't going to run washing machines at 2AM in the summertime to avoid a $0.50 fee
I often run mine at night, but for other reasons -- your quote betrays your ignorance of the subject matter. A typical efficient washer uses about 100 watt-hours per load. The absolute cost of that would be a few cents US, and the marginal cost of operating that machine during peak hours would be far less than that.
since nobody will be around to flip the laundry into the dryer
Into the what?? You still waste energy on those? In the Summer?!? During the day? Suckers like you are who's buying my peak-rate photovoltaic solar generation. Keep it up!
Additionally, many, many places don't have the necessary last-mile power infrastructure to handle the electric cars that are supposedly going to drive increased consumer demand.
Not sure where you got on the anti electric vehicle thing, but you're missing the point of a "smarter" grid. Regardless of the nature of the generation technology or the load, a smarter grid with managed loads will utilize the grid more efficiently.
Just buy a diesel Jetta, which has a far lower TCO
As long as you externalize the cost of particulate pollution, global warming, lung disease, and foreign wars to acquire "cheap" oil. Sounds great.
Hell, hybrid diesel-electric cars are probably more practical.
Starting sentences with "Hell, comma" makes you look like a high school student.
X.com was one of the companies that merged to form PayPal. They epitomized the bubble "land grab" mentality by giving away free money to attract customers.
I still have a check for $0.01 sent to me (for no obvious reason) by "PayPal's X.com" during the bubble days. It's such a perfect metaphor for the stupidity of that era that I just had to save it and frame it.
I see you had arrhythmia during 7th grade pickle ball? No insurance for you
Why not focus on fixing the insurance problem instead of making life more difficult for the public school system? If your 7th-grader actually has arrhythmia, wouldn't you rather find out sooner?
If I had enough time and/or money to personally educate my children at home, I would instead spend it by volunteering at their local public school, where my contribution would have more societal benefit. I don't doubt that spending 100% of my attention on my own children might improve their test scores dramatically, but what is the point of raising enlightened offspring in a society of fools?
If you value the education of your own children more than that of others, that's fine, but it's also selfish.
It's only a ripoff if you deluded yourself into believing that your 1TB disc drive would have 2^40 bytes of storage. Since we both know you knew better, it's a bit specious to claim you got ripped off.
We're talking about BYTES here and that is inherently base 2...8 bits = 1 byte. It isn't 10 bits = 1 byte.
I respect your dissent, but you're not starting off strong, here. There are 10-bit bytes, 7-bit bytes, and 12-bit bytes -- the number of bits in a byte is totally arbitrary. It sounds like most of the hardware you use uses 8-bit bytes, which is only coincidentally a power of two.
Aside from your limited notion of a "byte", there is utterly nothing else about disc drive construction that is inherently base 2, not that that would matter much anyway.
you should be adhering to the computer's definition of a Gigabyte
There computer doesn't have a "definition" because it's inanimate, and since the computer works for me and not the other way around, I should never have to do anything to accommodate it.
Computers use binary. I get it. I'm a software engineer. But humans don't use binary, and we're talking about human-machine interface, here. Humans seldom even use binary notation in our programming languages.
I hope you post to Slashdot using binary ASCII codes instead using of some convenient code page, because the computer's TRUE REPRESENTATION of your post is just a bunch of ones and zeros.
This is a case of marketing trumping computer science.
Actually, it's a case of human factors trumping computer science, which is a good thing, since few computer users are computer scientists. At least 5, if not 10 standard deviations of hard disc sales go to human beings who are not computer scientists. Human beings use base 10 innately, and there is absolutely no reason to force them to think in base two, just because they've attached something to a computer.
Is Apple's move the first major step in forcing computer science to adopt [...]
No, it's not. Disc drive makers have been doing it for years, and it's the right thing to do for a multitude of human factors reasons. Humans use base ten innately, and it is easier to rationalize disc space in base ten units. (The same goes for file sizes, by the way.)
The fact that computers use binary deep down inside them is a pretty flimsy argument for insisting that we do the same, merely because some peripheral device is attached to said computer.
If you pay via PayPal, always always always use a credit card when you do it. If you get screwed by a seller and PayPal doesn't make it right, call your credit card company, and most often they will reverse the charge.
If you used PayPal with the "instant transfer from your bank account" or whatever, then, well, too bad. Chalk it up as a learning experience and use your credit card next time.
None of the alternatives you mention are within an order of magnitude of replacing coal or nuclear. Biofuels? Are you serious?
Absolutely serious. In fact, there is a pilot plant currently operating in Brazil
Brazil has a 12-month growing season and a tiny, tiny fraction of our energy use. Biofuels make sense to the extent that we can use waste products from material that is grown anyway, but in the end it comes down to efficiency: Plants capture at best 1-2% of incident solar radiation, and we already have MUCH better collectors.
Today's energy economy is a mixture of many sources of energy.
Of course it is, and it is utterly dominated by coal (roughly 50% in the USA), and potentially dominated by nuclear. All of the wind+solar+biofuel sources combined do not add up to 1% of our electrical generation, and their present growth rates will not make them significant for decades. Pretending otherwise displays a lack of touch with reality.
Additionally, solar has fair correlation with daily peak loads, but neither wind nor solar are good base load candidates in any but the most theoretical deployments.
Then you need to hurry up and inform the people in states like mine that the new wind and solar plants that they are building don't make economic sense.
If you want to have a public debate with me, don't be a jackass and deliberately misinterpret what I wrote. If you do it again, I won't reply.
I wrote that we should be building wind and solar as fast as possible. Wind in particular is very cost competitive. Solar is very expensive compared to coal, but looks much better if you account for the latter's externalities. Neither wind nor solar is positioned to replace base load plants, though, and my reality beats your theory, here. If you disagree, please post a link to the number of coal and/or nuclear plants scheduled to be shut down now that you have all that wind and solar deployed.
There are a number of practical alternatives emerging in the marketplace, including natural gas, biofuels, and wind and solar (depending on where you live). Even burning coal doesn't have to be dirty.
None of the alternatives you mention are within an order of magnitude of replacing coal or nuclear. Biofuels? Are you serious? Not even within two orders of magnitude.
It's not coal vs. natural gas. NG might scale, but even if you believe there's an adequate supply, it's several times more expensive.
It's not coal vs. wind and solar, either. Cheap baseload energy means coal and nuclear -- that's the tradeoff. I'm all for wind and solar power (we should be building out as fast as we can) but pretending they're somehow comparable to coal and nuclear is nuts.
You realize that nuclear power is the opposite of clean energy? It creates highly dangerous/toxic waste that's dangerous for thousands
Please stop spreading this dangerous misinformation. Do you even know how much waste you're talking about? Imagine a cylinder 10mm in diameter. A 5mm slice of that cylinder will supply your energy needs for a year. The rest of the world stores the byproducts safely on site, and there's no reason we can't do the same. Future reactor designs will burn the fuel more completely resulting in less (and safer) remaining waste.
Burning coal (the only practical alternative to nuclear) releases far more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power ever has or will. And don't even get me started on the mercury poisoning of lakes, etc.
But you can carry less battery and fuel up with liquid fuel instead, so you don't have to carry all your fuel/range with you.
Believe me, I get the theory -- my company is responsible in one way or another for most of the EVs on the road today and I have to deal with "suggestions" from armchair engineers every day. Unfortunately there's no escaping the fact that the pure EV will be more efficient within its range (and this is unquestionably the vast majority of our driving).
The "motor always runs at peak efficiency" is strained, too, because you actually do have to vary the power to match the road load, or else you're cycling the battery (which both accelerates wearout and is prohibitively inefficient). It's not a coincidence that roughly 100% of passenger vehicles use mechanical transmissions.
Make a histogram showing your number of miles driven daily. A typical EV with 100-mile range will cover ~95% of the daily use for most people. Schemes to bring the EV from 95% coverage to 100% include series hybrid configurations, battery swapping, and fast charging. All of these systems add significant cost and complexity and they only buy you a few more bars way out on the tail of the histogram.
What I don't understand about these electric vehicles, to help people get over the 'range anxiety'
Note that range anxiety is a psychological problem, not a real technical problem. Thus, the solution is not likely to be technical in nature. If you need to take long trips regularly or drive more than 150 miles per day, EVs aren't for you. Fortunately for the other 96% of us, they're a good fit.
why they don't put a small gas or electric generator in the car somewhere?
Some manufacturers are planning vehicles like this. They're called series hybrids. Chevrolet's Volt will be one such car, if it ever makes it to market.
The fundamental disconnect is that you're proposing a technical solution (series hybrids) to a psychological problem (range anxiety). Series hybrids introduce technical problems of their own. Namely,
That gas generator isn't very small after all -- it needs to produce 20,000-50,000 watts to sustain a charge. This is a nontrivial packaging problem. Most people who propose this are imaging a small portable generator that's good for a few kilowatts at most.
Additional complexity. When you add the internal combustion drivetrain to the mix, now you have to engineer two complete drivetrains. You sacrifice the incredibly low maintenance of the pure electric car (no oil changes, etc).
Additional weight. The gasoline system is heavy. Weight is very strongly (inversely) corellated with efficiency.
A series hybrid is in many ways the worst of both worlds. We already know from statistics that drivers will spend ~95% of their driving on local short trips using primarily electric power. This means that 95% of the time, you're dragging around needless weight and complexity. The other 5% of the time (on gas power) you're never going to get the efficiency of a good parallel hybrid system (a la Prius and friends). There's a reason passenger cars use mechanical transmissions instead of hybrid electric transmissions -- they're far more efficient.
Nissan is knowingly setting itself up to over-promise and under-deliver by quoting the EPA range of 100 miles, because the EPA test is well known to be extremely optimistic for EVs. AC Propulsion's eBox has an EPA range of ~170 miles, but a realistic range of 130. Tesla's Roadster has an EPA range of ~220 miles, but a realistic range of 175.
Nissan's car will probably have a realistic range of 70-80 miles. The good news is that this is more than enough for many, many households. The bad news is that many households don't realize it, because "range anxiety" is a very real (psychological) phenomenon, even though actual range limits are not.
Actually, I think that an application that monitors your car's battery/fuel/power source and is linked to a GPS with a trip planner saying "Hey, you won't get there with your current battery/fuel/etc level, you need to get more juice" would be fricken useful.
Interesting? Probably, but not really necessary in practice. It's normal for inexperienced drivers to obsess about range -- there's even a term for it: range anxiety. But it's merely a psychological problem -- range itself is almost never a problem.
EVs just aren't designed for road trips. Sure, you can do it if you're patient and determined. But the good news is that they're perfect for the other 97% of our driving needs, and as a result, most people, most of the time, just plug the thing in at home, because it's the cheapest and most convenient way to charge.
Slashdot Mirror
So where is the incentive to earn?
Your incentive to earn (which I'm sure is alive and well) doesn't trump the intended incentive to keep you from breaking laws.
and isn't a hidden income redistribution effort.
Now that is amusing, although I suspect you were being serious. A system that extracts money from filthy rich scofflaws? I'd welcome it.
It's wrong to give a rich guy a harsher punishment because he's rich just like it's wrong to give a poor guy a harsher punishment because he's poor.
That was the whole original point -- an $XX fine is a harsher punishment to me than it is to Bill Gates.
Please go back and read -- he said "no one" will do it at 2 AM.
are you aware that some US homeowners' associations prohibit the use of a washing line
I am aware of that, but those are homeowners associations and thus the power to change the rules lies within the grasp of the owners. If they don't, then those owners are doomed to paying higher energy rates.
[...] (so forcing the use of a dryer)
Whoah, hang on. No one is forcing anyone to live anywhere with silly energy-wasting rules -- they chose it for themselves -- and it's easy to dry clothes indoors, especially during the aforementioned daytime summer hours. If you choose to live in a "community" with such backwards rules, there are surely going to be other problems anyway.
Personally, I think the higher energy prices will (eventually) provide the incentive to overturn the silly rules, possibly en masse with laws that make the rules unenforceable.
And ad hominem [sic] makes you look like a politician.
It wasn't an ad hominem argument; it was free advice about his stilted writing style. Here's some free advice for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Common_misconceptions_about_ad_hominem
People aren't going to run washing machines at 2AM in the summertime to avoid a $0.50 fee
I often run mine at night, but for other reasons -- your quote betrays your ignorance of the subject matter. A typical efficient washer uses about 100 watt-hours per load. The absolute cost of that would be a few cents US, and the marginal cost of operating that machine during peak hours would be far less than that.
since nobody will be around to flip the laundry into the dryer
Into the what?? You still waste energy on those? In the Summer?!? During the day? Suckers like you are who's buying my peak-rate photovoltaic solar generation. Keep it up!
Additionally, many, many places don't have the necessary last-mile power infrastructure to handle the electric cars that are supposedly going to drive increased consumer demand.
Not sure where you got on the anti electric vehicle thing, but you're missing the point of a "smarter" grid. Regardless of the nature of the generation technology or the load, a smarter grid with managed loads will utilize the grid more efficiently.
Just buy a diesel Jetta, which has a far lower TCO
As long as you externalize the cost of particulate pollution, global warming, lung disease, and foreign wars to acquire "cheap" oil. Sounds great.
Hell, hybrid diesel-electric cars are probably more practical.
Starting sentences with "Hell, comma" makes you look like a high school student.
Many people don't know the difference between "your" and "you're" but that doesn't mean the rest of us should stop caring.
X.com was one of the companies that merged to form PayPal. They epitomized the bubble "land grab" mentality by giving away free money to attract customers.
I still have a check for $0.01 sent to me (for no obvious reason) by "PayPal's X.com" during the bubble days. It's such a perfect metaphor for the stupidity of that era that I just had to save it and frame it.
I know and agree completely. I probably shouldn't have included that second sentence -- it only detracts from my primary point.
I see you had arrhythmia during 7th grade pickle ball? No insurance for you
Why not focus on fixing the insurance problem instead of making life more difficult for the public school system? If your 7th-grader actually has arrhythmia, wouldn't you rather find out sooner?
C'mon now, that's below the belt.
Depends. If it's a high school student, then the belt might be quite a bit lower.
If I had enough time and/or money to personally educate my children at home, I would instead spend it by volunteering at their local public school, where my contribution would have more societal benefit. I don't doubt that spending 100% of my attention on my own children might improve their test scores dramatically, but what is the point of raising enlightened offspring in a society of fools?
If you value the education of your own children more than that of others, that's fine, but it's also selfish.
The ripoff scales non-linearly with size
It's only a ripoff if you deluded yourself into believing that your 1TB disc drive would have 2^40 bytes of storage. Since we both know you knew better, it's a bit specious to claim you got ripped off.
We're talking about BYTES here and that is inherently base 2...8 bits = 1 byte. It isn't 10 bits = 1 byte.
I respect your dissent, but you're not starting off strong, here. There are 10-bit bytes, 7-bit bytes, and 12-bit bytes -- the number of bits in a byte is totally arbitrary. It sounds like most of the hardware you use uses 8-bit bytes, which is only coincidentally a power of two.
Aside from your limited notion of a "byte", there is utterly nothing else about disc drive construction that is inherently base 2, not that that would matter much anyway.
you should be adhering to the computer's definition of a Gigabyte
There computer doesn't have a "definition" because it's inanimate, and since the computer works for me and not the other way around, I should never have to do anything to accommodate it.
Computers use binary. I get it. I'm a software engineer. But humans don't use binary, and we're talking about human-machine interface, here. Humans seldom even use binary notation in our programming languages.
I hope you post to Slashdot using binary ASCII codes instead using of some convenient code page, because the computer's TRUE REPRESENTATION of your post is just a bunch of ones and zeros.
This is a case of marketing trumping computer science.
Actually, it's a case of human factors trumping computer science, which is a good thing, since few computer users are computer scientists. At least 5, if not 10 standard deviations of hard disc sales go to human beings who are not computer scientists . Human beings use base 10 innately, and there is absolutely no reason to force them to think in base two, just because they've attached something to a computer.
Is Apple's move the first major step in forcing computer science to adopt [...]
No, it's not. Disc drive makers have been doing it for years, and it's the right thing to do for a multitude of human factors reasons. Humans use base ten innately, and it is easier to rationalize disc space in base ten units. (The same goes for file sizes, by the way.)
The fact that computers use binary deep down inside them is a pretty flimsy argument for insisting that we do the same, merely because some peripheral device is attached to said computer.
Please mod parent informative, because it absolutely is.
If you pay via PayPal, always always always use a credit card when you do it. If you get screwed by a seller and PayPal doesn't make it right, call your credit card company, and most often they will reverse the charge.
If you used PayPal with the "instant transfer from your bank account" or whatever, then, well, too bad. Chalk it up as a learning experience and use your credit card next time.
None of the alternatives you mention are within an order of magnitude of replacing coal or nuclear. Biofuels? Are you serious?
Absolutely serious. In fact, there is a pilot plant currently operating in Brazil
Brazil has a 12-month growing season and a tiny, tiny fraction of our energy use. Biofuels make sense to the extent that we can use waste products from material that is grown anyway, but in the end it comes down to efficiency: Plants capture at best 1-2% of incident solar radiation, and we already have MUCH better collectors.
Today's energy economy is a mixture of many sources of energy.
Of course it is, and it is utterly dominated by coal (roughly 50% in the USA), and potentially dominated by nuclear. All of the wind+solar+biofuel sources combined do not add up to 1% of our electrical generation, and their present growth rates will not make them significant for decades. Pretending otherwise displays a lack of touch with reality.
Additionally, solar has fair correlation with daily peak loads, but neither wind nor solar are good base load candidates in any but the most theoretical deployments.
Then you need to hurry up and inform the people in states like mine that the new wind and solar plants that they are building don't make economic sense.
If you want to have a public debate with me, don't be a jackass and deliberately misinterpret what I wrote. If you do it again, I won't reply.
I wrote that we should be building wind and solar as fast as possible. Wind in particular is very cost competitive. Solar is very expensive compared to coal, but looks much better if you account for the latter's externalities. Neither wind nor solar is positioned to replace base load plants, though, and my reality beats your theory, here. If you disagree, please post a link to the number of coal and/or nuclear plants scheduled to be shut down now that you have all that wind and solar deployed.
There are a number of practical alternatives emerging in the marketplace, including natural gas, biofuels, and wind and solar (depending on where you live). Even burning coal doesn't have to be dirty.
None of the alternatives you mention are within an order of magnitude of replacing coal or nuclear. Biofuels? Are you serious? Not even within two orders of magnitude.
It's not coal vs. natural gas. NG might scale, but even if you believe there's an adequate supply, it's several times more expensive.
It's not coal vs. wind and solar, either. Cheap baseload energy means coal and nuclear -- that's the tradeoff. I'm all for wind and solar power (we should be building out as fast as we can) but pretending they're somehow comparable to coal and nuclear is nuts.
You realize that nuclear power is the opposite of clean energy? It creates highly dangerous/toxic waste that's dangerous for thousands
Please stop spreading this dangerous misinformation. Do you even know how much waste you're talking about? Imagine a cylinder 10mm in diameter. A 5mm slice of that cylinder will supply your energy needs for a year. The rest of the world stores the byproducts safely on site, and there's no reason we can't do the same. Future reactor designs will burn the fuel more completely resulting in less (and safer) remaining waste.
Burning coal (the only practical alternative to nuclear) releases far more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power ever has or will. And don't even get me started on the mercury poisoning of lakes, etc.
But you can carry less battery and fuel up with liquid fuel instead, so you don't have to carry all your fuel/range with you.
Believe me, I get the theory -- my company is responsible in one way or another for most of the EVs on the road today and I have to deal with "suggestions" from armchair engineers every day. Unfortunately there's no escaping the fact that the pure EV will be more efficient within its range (and this is unquestionably the vast majority of our driving).
The "motor always runs at peak efficiency" is strained, too, because you actually do have to vary the power to match the road load, or else you're cycling the battery (which both accelerates wearout and is prohibitively inefficient). It's not a coincidence that roughly 100% of passenger vehicles use mechanical transmissions.
Make a histogram showing your number of miles driven daily. A typical EV with 100-mile range will cover ~95% of the daily use for most people. Schemes to bring the EV from 95% coverage to 100% include series hybrid configurations, battery swapping, and fast charging. All of these systems add significant cost and complexity and they only buy you a few more bars way out on the tail of the histogram.
What I don't understand about these electric vehicles, to help people get over the 'range anxiety'
Note that range anxiety is a psychological problem, not a real technical problem. Thus, the solution is not likely to be technical in nature. If you need to take long trips regularly or drive more than 150 miles per day, EVs aren't for you. Fortunately for the other 96% of us, they're a good fit.
why they don't put a small gas or electric generator in the car somewhere?
Some manufacturers are planning vehicles like this. They're called series hybrids. Chevrolet's Volt will be one such car, if it ever makes it to market.
The fundamental disconnect is that you're proposing a technical solution (series hybrids) to a psychological problem (range anxiety). Series hybrids introduce technical problems of their own. Namely,
Nissan is knowingly setting itself up to over-promise and under-deliver by quoting the EPA range of 100 miles, because the EPA test is well known to be extremely optimistic for EVs. AC Propulsion's eBox has an EPA range of ~170 miles, but a realistic range of 130. Tesla's Roadster has an EPA range of ~220 miles, but a realistic range of 175.
Nissan's car will probably have a realistic range of 70-80 miles. The good news is that this is more than enough for many, many households. The bad news is that many households don't realize it, because "range anxiety" is a very real (psychological) phenomenon, even though actual range limits are not.
Actually, I think that an application that monitors your car's battery/fuel/power source and is linked to a GPS with a trip planner saying "Hey, you won't get there with your current battery/fuel/etc level, you need to get more juice" would be fricken useful.
Interesting? Probably, but not really necessary in practice. It's normal for inexperienced drivers to obsess about range -- there's even a term for it: range anxiety. But it's merely a psychological problem -- range itself is almost never a problem.
EVs just aren't designed for road trips. Sure, you can do it if you're patient and determined. But the good news is that they're perfect for the other 97% of our driving needs, and as a result, most people, most of the time, just plug the thing in at home, because it's the cheapest and most convenient way to charge.