When the city was upgrading, it was claimed in the news that there was a lot of damage to the mechanical meters from people trying to steal the coins. This resulted in excessive maintenance costs and under utilized parking spaces.
Also, while the trucks and other associated materials would be expensive, the labour should be significantly cheaper. Less people are required to enforce payment, as the trucks drive down the street without anyone stopping to issue tickets.
I guess the economics would be beneficial in the long run.
I'm doing some extended travel, and I was hoping that my Sony ereader would be able to replace all my paper books. This is the first time I really tested out my reader. It works great for my entertainment reading, but I find that for guide books (reference type reading?) it seems slow. I tend to flip quickly thru the pages skimming and the e-ink version seems less useful than my paper versions, because of refresh time.
Electronic books don't necessarily have to be foolish. The five issues pointed out as problems above are really issues with the content rather than the technology. There are plenty of sources of free text content. Whether or not they are suitable on current readers is another story.
As others have pointed out, searching and portability seem to be the big benefits. Conceivably acquisition and sharing of content (including mark-ups) could be made easy by the technology.
I have not used specialized electronic readers, but I do a lot of reading from my Tablet PC. For e-book readers, I think inherent issues would be durability, and the need for special input methods for marking-up. I miss the feel of the paper itself and flipping pages when I read books on my computer.
I've always found electric more interesting. It seems to have less drawbacks than hydrogen.
I only know of three ways to obtain hydrogen: electrolysis, cracking fossil fuels, and bacteria. Last I heard bacteria process were at the reasearch level only, and produced in the order of *grams* of hydrogen. The fossil fuel approach is not desirable. For electrolysis, from a gathering standpoint, electricity should be better than hydrogen by the second law of thermodynamics.
I always thought that transmission of electricity was efficient to above 95%, but the last electrical course I took was four years ago. I know hydrogen has drawbacks in distribution. If it is to be transported, hydrogen requires billion dollar pipelines, and thermodynamically, moving molecules is tougher than moving electrons.
Electricity has drawbacks in storage, but so does hydrogen. From the article, tanks must be insulated, or withstand high pressures, and unrecoverable energy must be expended compressing or refridgerating.
Using materials that collect hydrogen for storage is also problematic, as the materials deteriorate, cause a low energy density, and add mass to the vehicle. Intuitively, it seems it should be easier to store electrons in materials, than molecules.
Anyway, it's sad to hear from the other discussion that Ford and GM are cancelling their electric programs.
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When the city was upgrading, it was claimed in the news that there was a lot of damage to the mechanical meters from people trying to steal the coins. This resulted in excessive maintenance costs and under utilized parking spaces.
Also, while the trucks and other associated materials would be expensive, the labour should be significantly cheaper. Less people are required to enforce payment, as the trucks drive down the street without anyone stopping to issue tickets.
I guess the economics would be beneficial in the long run.
I'm doing some extended travel, and I was hoping that my Sony ereader would be able to replace all my paper books. This is the first time I really tested out my reader. It works great for my entertainment reading, but I find that for guide books (reference type reading?) it seems slow. I tend to flip quickly thru the pages skimming and the e-ink version seems less useful than my paper versions, because of refresh time.
The following web page from Citizenship and Immigration Canada seems pretty helpful: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/newcomers/before-info.asp.
Electronic books don't necessarily have to be foolish. The five issues pointed out as problems above are really issues with the content rather than the technology. There are plenty of sources of free text content. Whether or not they are suitable on current readers is another story.
As others have pointed out, searching and portability seem to be the big benefits. Conceivably acquisition and sharing of content (including mark-ups) could be made easy by the technology.
I have not used specialized electronic readers, but I do a lot of reading from my Tablet PC. For e-book readers, I think inherent issues would be durability, and the need for special input methods for marking-up. I miss the feel of the paper itself and flipping pages when I read books on my computer.
I've always found electric more interesting. It seems to have less drawbacks than hydrogen.
I only know of three ways to obtain hydrogen: electrolysis, cracking fossil fuels, and bacteria. Last I heard bacteria process were at the reasearch level only, and produced in the order of *grams* of hydrogen. The fossil fuel approach is not desirable. For electrolysis, from a gathering standpoint, electricity should be better than hydrogen by the second law of thermodynamics.
I always thought that transmission of electricity was efficient to above 95%, but the last electrical course I took was four years ago. I know hydrogen has drawbacks in distribution. If it is to be transported, hydrogen requires billion dollar pipelines, and thermodynamically, moving molecules is tougher than moving electrons.
Electricity has drawbacks in storage, but so does hydrogen. From the article, tanks must be insulated, or withstand high pressures, and unrecoverable energy must be expended compressing or refridgerating.
Using materials that collect hydrogen for storage is also problematic, as the materials deteriorate, cause a low energy density, and add mass to the vehicle. Intuitively, it seems it should be easier to store electrons in materials, than molecules.
Anyway, it's sad to hear from the other discussion that Ford and GM are cancelling their electric programs.