I don't run two servers on one machine; I run 40. That one machine costs 1/2 of what the 40 used to cost after accounting for the fact that everything is now stored on high-end enterprise storage devices rather than local disks that die all the time and those VMware licensing fees. The amount of money saved in datacenter space and power costs is absolutely staggering. That one machine is also vastly more reliable than any of the 40 it replaces. If it dies, I have many others that all those VMs can come back up on automatically with HA and DRS ensuring everything remains balanced and performing as expected. A dead server becomes a rare event that costs me as much downtime as pressing the reset switch on a physical box.
When I have a virtual server that's running low on disk space, I can simply increase its disk space either by adding additional disks on the fly or by enlarging the existing one. When a virtual server has an increasing workload that demands more RAM, I can hot-add it from 30,000 ft with no downtime. When someone's about to do something potentially risky like a software upgrade on a virtual server, I simply take a snapshot. If the whole thing goes wrong, I revert it. It takes 5 minutes and again, can be done from 30,000 ft. Need five new servers by the end of today? I can have them up in 2 hours. Need an identical copy of one that's already configured? Give me an hour. Need a demo system for one week out of each month? Easy, and it costs me nothing but some storage.
I don't know if you work in the tech industry, but if you do, I don't understand how you're still working in the tech industry without having at least some idea as to at least some of the advantages of virtualization. I have more control over more systems that cost me a fraction of what they used to and are now unimaginably more reliable. Even if you have 5 servers, I don't see how miss the benefits of virtualization. As for the overhead, if ESXi takes a GB or two our of the hundreds on a given physical box, so be it. It's saving so much money it's ridiculous.
Good. Someone needs to stand up to immature little bitches like that. Now if the person who fired the guy involved gets shitcanned himself and the guy who originally got fired gets his old job back WITH back pay, I'll actually have a little more faith in humanity.
So tired of this sensitivity obsessed corporate world. I don't give a good goddamn fuck if you're offended by something you overheard. If you don't like it, ignore it or have the balls to say something yourself. Rather than catering to these whiny little bitches (both male and female) who run to HR/twitter/whatever every time somebody makes a comment they don't approve of, we should rain flaming sulphur down on them until they get an idea of what little real impact words actually have.
To all of you over 12 years old who go running to some adult-figure every time you're offended by words, grow the fuck up or die in a fire.
That's rather silly and makes no real sense. It's actually like saying the solution to credit card debt is a second job. If your spending remains the same and a second job causes your overall income to rise to meet or exceed that level, you're solving your debt problem.
An analogy that's equivalent to what you're suggesting would be to say that raising the debt ceiling is the solution to overspending.
That's like saying ATMs will always be a losing proposition for banks because they started out free. You get people used to using them, then you slowly introduce gradually increasing fees until you make bank.
More likely, you let others build them for you, charge them for the interface license, charge the manufacturers for the interface license, and then throw that money into R&D to make 2.0 (500 miles worth of charge in 10 minutes?) that they'll have to pay you to upgrade to.
I understand the maneuver, but at that speed, it's absolutely suicide for all involved. One or more of those vehicles is going sideways on contact and those that do are going airborne. By clearing a path and letting the car run itself out of fuel, they were able to safely stop it. By attempting what you're suggesting, you'd have several dead bodies and a lot of destroyed property to account for.
Also, the police are paid to deter crime, investigate crimes, and arrest offenders. They aren't paid to take a bullet for you. Asking them to make vehicle-to-vehicle contact at 125mph is asking for even more than that.
I can not find a reliable electric car that can even get me to work, let alone support a broader range of use.
So no, I'm not going to give up my small efficient car for an EV. Not until they're fucking usable.
See also: the slow transition from horses to cars, as prices, convenience and capability improved.
The largest battery option for the Model S has an estimated 300 mile range. Do you work 300 miles away from your home?
I think multiple long distance drives up and down the East and West coasts have shown that for the vast majority of use cases (i.e. most Americans and virtually all Europeans), the Model S is perfectly usable today.
You appear to be condemning a technology you know little about, much like many ignorant people initially rejected cars; failing to see just how useful they were and how dominant they'd become. I'd buy a Model S today if the top end was a $40,000 car. Tesla is working on that in the next iteration. They seem to be the only serious player in making drop-in replacements for FCE vehicles.
Also, if you don't know what a word or abbreviation means, try looking it up in any of the 12,000 different reference sources on the Internet. But I guess that technology is also beyond you.
I'm not about to argue that the existing Supercharge infrastructure is anywhere near where it needs to be for mass adoption. I was only suggesting the best places to begin widescale implementation in order to work within peoples' existing habits (or as close to them as possible). If I'm doing a 500 mile trip and I can stop roughly halfway for lunch at a Denny's, plug in my EV, and come out with enough battery to complete my trip for the day, I'm in business. The Model S Signature has a 300 mile range. If you're having to stop every other hour, you're pushing 20% of Mach 1 at sea level. Might want to slow down. More realistically, you're doing 4 - 5 hours of driving with about a 1 hour break for a Supercharge session. Ultimately, the 5-minute quick change option is what would trump any concerns about recharge times. At that point, all you need are gas stations that can shoulder some of the initial investment for that infrastructure and you have a viable drop-in replacement for FCE vehicles.
But that also kind of misses the point. EVs aren't precisely drop-in replacements for FCE vehicles, nor are all things to all people. Too often, I see criticisms like "it won't work as well in -30 degree weather". My FCE vehicle probably won't work well in -30 degree weather and you know what? I don't blame it. In extreme conditions, a great deal of modern technology breaks down. The fact that EVs don't completely solve this doesn't make them any less viable. I put that one right up there with "but I need to tow my boat!" Then you know what? You shouldn't buy an EV (at least not for a good, long time until the technology covers that use case efficiently). Neither should you buy a Corvette. They're great cars, just not for towing boats. And honestly, at this point, if you're regularly making 500+ mile car trips, you also shouldn't buy an EV. They simply don't work well for your use case. But neither does a rally-style car due to the severe discomfort you'll experience during extended travel. Double that for people who do a lot of off-road driving. If you need to climb mountains in a vehicle, stick with an FCE vehicle (and again, not a Corvette or a rally-style car). That doesn't mean EVs don't cover the other 95% of use cases as well or better than FCE vehicles.
The arguments made here are likely very similar to the arguments made against early FCE vehicles when horses were the primary mode of transportation. "What do you mean I have to stop and put fuel in it every 50 miles?! I can ride my horse all day!" "I have to plan my route so refueling stations are within range the whole way? That's crazy! The 'fuel' for my horse is everywhere!" "I have to keep this thing on the road? What if I want to go over a mountain or cross a stream with no bridge?! My horse can just walk across it!"
And yet, of all the people driving their cars around every day today, how many would give up ever using an FCE vehicle for a horse? In 50 years, people will look back on this time the same way we look at the transition from horse to FCE vehicle and wonder why anyone hung onto the old way of doing things.
My gas car says I have about 350 miles range when I fill up the tank. When I drive it at 80+ mph for 250 miles, it says I have 30 miles of range left. Range estimates change based on conditions unknown at the time of the original estimate. That's true for any vehicle. If the average Joe drives his car based on the initial range estimate rather than what it's currently telling him, he's an idiot and deserves to be stuck on the side of the road. That isn't the car's fault; it's the operator's.
As for recharge times, a Supercharge station will give you most of your charge back from 0 in the time it takes to eat lunch. Put them in restaurant and hotel parking lots and problem solved.
"Poor Mr. Broder" took an EV out for an 80mph joy ride with the heat blasting into the mid 70s with sub-freezing temps outside, undercharged the vehicle (and in at least one case, didn't charge it at all), and then complained when multiple instances of running the EV to near-empty finally resulted in a no-start condition because he turned the vehicle off while it was nearly dead.
It's a hit piece, plain and simple. The sooner Tesla gets a well respected, independent third party in to review all the collected data, the sooner the issue can be put to bed. From where I sit, this was a biased reporter who - at best - allowed personal opinions to completely ruin a story or - at worst - completely fabricated a hit piece with a shoddily constructed story without realizing Tesla could actually challenge his claims with real data. I think it's more a dumb reporter who doesn't understand this new-fangled technology and decided he didn't like it for whatever reason who then sputtered out non-sensical jibberish that completely failed to accurately educate readers.
I see that same thing happen every time I read a news story about science or technology that I understand well. Reporters seem to have very little attention to detail or regard for objective fact. As much as I see that pattern when it comes to news stories on topics I understand well, I find it hard to believe that all other reporting is spot-on. Likely, it's also the product of writers and editors who are as bad at their jobs as most people are.
I'm sorry, but at 125mph, your solution is... to ram the car?
If the vehicle is accelerating unexpectedly and beyond the control of the driver (or I guess, passenger at that point), getting close to it at all - particularly right up in front of it - is stupidly suicidal. You may as well suggest they shoot out his tires. That, at least, would put less lives in danger.
Tesla has the benefit of being the first ones out there with a real EV that works, so they have an opportunity to set the standard. They need to put as much as they possibly can into getting supercharging stations at every rest stop, restaurant, and hotel in and around population centers. You're going to spend 45 minutes eating at Denny's (or wherever) anyway. If you can plug in your Tesla and charge to nearly full while you do it? That's brilliant.
Once they have critical mass of infrastructure in place, they can charge a very small licensing fee to other EV manufacturers for the interface technology and set the major standard for the next couple decades while practically printing money along the way.
As for the Volt, it can't be "100% electric" if it has a gasoline engine. Just like the Prius and others, it's an EV until it isn't. That entire time, it's an overcomplicated bit of machinery trying to be all things to all people. I just hope Tesla manages to get their next model out soon since it's targeting under $30,000 with specs comparable to the Model S. That, I think, is where they have the opportunity to get huge.
Tesla's first car had a base price of $110,000. The founder and CEO of Tesla Motors stated that sales of that car would finance the R&D for a cheaper vehicle, which became the Model S. Base price starts about $52,000. The next stated target for Tesla Motors is an EV comparable to the Model S with a base price under $30,000.
Tesla's first customers were expensive toys for people who just want posh toys. The Model S is directly competing with BMW, Lexus, and others. Their customers for the Model S are middle class professionals; not just trust fund babies and hedge fund managers.
As for EV cars, the difference now is that Tesla is the first company to produce an EV that could actually function as a drop-in replacement for fuel-combustion vehicles. This is especially true if they can put together a functional business model for the promised 5-minute quick-change battery swap. If that happens, you're now talking about a car with comparable range to typical FCEs and a comparable refueling time to typical FCEs. That's definitely never existed before.
However, even with just the Quickcharge stations, Tesla has managed to make a car that recharges almost to full while you grab lunch. That's huge. They should put those at every Denny's and Marriott in the country.
The logs need to be released to a neutral and well respected third party. I strongly suspect they'll then report back that the NYT reporter is full of shit and the NYT will can the guy immediately while running a retraction on page C19, right under an ad for used peanut butter. The moment the fight starts making the NYT brand look less credible, the reporter goes under the bus and the story goes away.
He ran out of juice because he undercharged it on three separate occasions, the last of which had him going on a 60 mile trip with 30 miles of range showing on the car. He hadn't even bothered plugging in the vehicle the night before; merely let it sit in sub-freezing temperatures with very little juice left, then hopped in and went until it died, passing a supercharging station along the way.
Really? He said he drove at 45mph with little to no heat. The car says he drove at 81 with the heat cranked up to over 70F in freezing temperatures where you'd be comfortable in the low to mid 60s.
Yes, and then three months later the same reporter pulls the same stunt with the same results using a car gained from another source. Then what do you do? Come back and claim it wasn't actually your support staff, but the reporter the whole time?
The best thing Musk can do is get some high-profile neutral third party to come in, look at the raw data, and publicly report that the NYT reporter is full of shit. The NYT would then likely throw the reporter under the bus to save the credibility of the brand (essentially doing what you're saying Tesla should do) and the whole thing ends up a huge, HUGE PR boost for Tesla and Musk.
Musk designed the first all-electric vehicle that's worth a damn and he sends freaking rockets into outer space. The fact that his cars actually work (Tesla Roadster has gotten great praise and Model S is winning all kinds of awards) and that his rockets actually go to outer space tells me the guy is in a better position to know what's going on than some idiot reporter.
"...drove the EV something like 2 miles into the heart of a major city with huge traffic congestion issues where it could take 45 minutes to move a mile..."
A grown man riding a freaking big wheel went one mile in NYC in less time than the city's fleet of buses take to go the same route and distance. He not only beat the bus, he did so by two minutes. On a big wheel. That two miles looks a bit bigger now doesn't it?
But that isn't as much the point, is it? Per Musk's data from the Model S driven, the guy undercharged the car three separate times, sped like a maniac with the heat cranked up, and drove it around in circles in a parking lot trying to kill off the battery. He then responded to the accusations with basically a "nuh uhhhh!" when they had a freaking black box recording every single thing done in the entire vehicle.
This is the kind of crap you catch 10 year olds trying to pull on their parents.
Actually, you don't need both. It may be desirable to reach a balanced budget with a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases in order to lessen the blow from either, but either will work for balancing the budget. On the flip side, you could balance the budget entirely through revenue increases. Simply increase tax rates across the board until the budget is balanced. Done. Or you can simply cut spending until it's in line with revenues. An across-the-board (including all entitlements) cut of, say, 25% of spending will do that. Or you could cut all spending by 75% and have a large surplus. Or you could do an infinite number of combinations to reach any given stated goal.
The point being, the Tea Party folks may be calling for something that isn't necessarily healthy for the US economy, but they most certainly aren't calling for something that's impossible by any stretch of the imagination.
If you're looking out the window for your enemy in a modern air combat situation, you're either about to die or lots of people screwed up in lots of ways.
Nobody has given much thought to non-BVR air combat in about 10 years and for good reason. First sight, first shot, first kill. That's the whole idea of stealth and advanced detection systems for fighters: I'm harder to see, so I see you first, so I shoot first, so I go home minus one long range missile. That's why a $140 Million F-22 makes more sense than three $40 Million Eurofighters. Once the fight is over, nobody got within 40 miles of an enemy and all you have to tally up is the cost of three planes and three trained fighter pilots versus the cost of three missiles and some gas.
Your first statement (which I'd agree with, as all countries have different reporting standards) moots your second. The reported rates are lower, but you need to be careful of a couple things. First, the UK Home Office has a nasty habit of separating statistics for England and Wales from Scotland and Norther Ireland. They do this because the stats for England and Wales are far, far better than those for the others (particularly Scotland).
Second, the UK Home Office statistics specifically on homicide reflect initial reports of homicides. In other words, if 10 people are killed in August, but the police don't find the bodies (or decide to rule them homicides) until January, the crime statistics reflect the homicides as occurring in the wrong year. As such, year-by-year statistics can vary widely and be quite inaccurate. The Home Office's own crime reports point this out, which is why I do.
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I don't run two servers on one machine; I run 40. That one machine costs 1/2 of what the 40 used to cost after accounting for the fact that everything is now stored on high-end enterprise storage devices rather than local disks that die all the time and those VMware licensing fees. The amount of money saved in datacenter space and power costs is absolutely staggering. That one machine is also vastly more reliable than any of the 40 it replaces. If it dies, I have many others that all those VMs can come back up on automatically with HA and DRS ensuring everything remains balanced and performing as expected. A dead server becomes a rare event that costs me as much downtime as pressing the reset switch on a physical box.
When I have a virtual server that's running low on disk space, I can simply increase its disk space either by adding additional disks on the fly or by enlarging the existing one. When a virtual server has an increasing workload that demands more RAM, I can hot-add it from 30,000 ft with no downtime. When someone's about to do something potentially risky like a software upgrade on a virtual server, I simply take a snapshot. If the whole thing goes wrong, I revert it. It takes 5 minutes and again, can be done from 30,000 ft. Need five new servers by the end of today? I can have them up in 2 hours. Need an identical copy of one that's already configured? Give me an hour. Need a demo system for one week out of each month? Easy, and it costs me nothing but some storage.
I don't know if you work in the tech industry, but if you do, I don't understand how you're still working in the tech industry without having at least some idea as to at least some of the advantages of virtualization. I have more control over more systems that cost me a fraction of what they used to and are now unimaginably more reliable. Even if you have 5 servers, I don't see how miss the benefits of virtualization. As for the overhead, if ESXi takes a GB or two our of the hundreds on a given physical box, so be it. It's saving so much money it's ridiculous.
The anticipated response from a child is to run and tell an adult.
The anticipated response from an adult is to quietly ask the individuals to cease their distracting conversation during the presentation.
I hadn't heard that she got fired.
Good. Someone needs to stand up to immature little bitches like that. Now if the person who fired the guy involved gets shitcanned himself and the guy who originally got fired gets his old job back WITH back pay, I'll actually have a little more faith in humanity.
So tired of this sensitivity obsessed corporate world. I don't give a good goddamn fuck if you're offended by something you overheard. If you don't like it, ignore it or have the balls to say something yourself. Rather than catering to these whiny little bitches (both male and female) who run to HR/twitter/whatever every time somebody makes a comment they don't approve of, we should rain flaming sulphur down on them until they get an idea of what little real impact words actually have.
To all of you over 12 years old who go running to some adult-figure every time you're offended by words, grow the fuck up or die in a fire.
That's rather silly and makes no real sense. It's actually like saying the solution to credit card debt is a second job. If your spending remains the same and a second job causes your overall income to rise to meet or exceed that level, you're solving your debt problem.
An analogy that's equivalent to what you're suggesting would be to say that raising the debt ceiling is the solution to overspending.
If you're traveling 220 miles round trip to work each day in those conditions, you don't need an EV, you need a helicopter.
You're also one of maybe 2,000 people in the US who are in that situation and are absolutely no barrier to EVs taking over the market.
Who said anything about indefinitely?
That's like saying ATMs will always be a losing proposition for banks because they started out free. You get people used to using them, then you slowly introduce gradually increasing fees until you make bank.
More likely, you let others build them for you, charge them for the interface license, charge the manufacturers for the interface license, and then throw that money into R&D to make 2.0 (500 miles worth of charge in 10 minutes?) that they'll have to pay you to upgrade to.
So you're saying that driving to work 110 miles each way in sub-zero temperatures with traffic jams and road closures are a regular thing for you?
Or maybe you're just being contrary...
I understand the maneuver, but at that speed, it's absolutely suicide for all involved. One or more of those vehicles is going sideways on contact and those that do are going airborne. By clearing a path and letting the car run itself out of fuel, they were able to safely stop it. By attempting what you're suggesting, you'd have several dead bodies and a lot of destroyed property to account for.
Also, the police are paid to deter crime, investigate crimes, and arrest offenders. They aren't paid to take a bullet for you. Asking them to make vehicle-to-vehicle contact at 125mph is asking for even more than that.
I can not find a reliable electric car that can even get me to work, let alone support a broader range of use.
So no, I'm not going to give up my small efficient car for an EV. Not until they're fucking usable.
See also: the slow transition from horses to cars, as prices, convenience and capability improved.
The largest battery option for the Model S has an estimated 300 mile range. Do you work 300 miles away from your home?
I think multiple long distance drives up and down the East and West coasts have shown that for the vast majority of use cases (i.e. most Americans and virtually all Europeans), the Model S is perfectly usable today.
You appear to be condemning a technology you know little about, much like many ignorant people initially rejected cars; failing to see just how useful they were and how dominant they'd become. I'd buy a Model S today if the top end was a $40,000 car. Tesla is working on that in the next iteration. They seem to be the only serious player in making drop-in replacements for FCE vehicles.
Also, if you don't know what a word or abbreviation means, try looking it up in any of the 12,000 different reference sources on the Internet. But I guess that technology is also beyond you.
I'm surprised he didn't turn up the A/C when the temperature hit 74.
I'm not about to argue that the existing Supercharge infrastructure is anywhere near where it needs to be for mass adoption. I was only suggesting the best places to begin widescale implementation in order to work within peoples' existing habits (or as close to them as possible). If I'm doing a 500 mile trip and I can stop roughly halfway for lunch at a Denny's, plug in my EV, and come out with enough battery to complete my trip for the day, I'm in business. The Model S Signature has a 300 mile range. If you're having to stop every other hour, you're pushing 20% of Mach 1 at sea level. Might want to slow down. More realistically, you're doing 4 - 5 hours of driving with about a 1 hour break for a Supercharge session. Ultimately, the 5-minute quick change option is what would trump any concerns about recharge times. At that point, all you need are gas stations that can shoulder some of the initial investment for that infrastructure and you have a viable drop-in replacement for FCE vehicles.
But that also kind of misses the point. EVs aren't precisely drop-in replacements for FCE vehicles, nor are all things to all people. Too often, I see criticisms like "it won't work as well in -30 degree weather". My FCE vehicle probably won't work well in -30 degree weather and you know what? I don't blame it. In extreme conditions, a great deal of modern technology breaks down. The fact that EVs don't completely solve this doesn't make them any less viable. I put that one right up there with "but I need to tow my boat!" Then you know what? You shouldn't buy an EV (at least not for a good, long time until the technology covers that use case efficiently). Neither should you buy a Corvette. They're great cars, just not for towing boats. And honestly, at this point, if you're regularly making 500+ mile car trips, you also shouldn't buy an EV. They simply don't work well for your use case. But neither does a rally-style car due to the severe discomfort you'll experience during extended travel. Double that for people who do a lot of off-road driving. If you need to climb mountains in a vehicle, stick with an FCE vehicle (and again, not a Corvette or a rally-style car). That doesn't mean EVs don't cover the other 95% of use cases as well or better than FCE vehicles.
The arguments made here are likely very similar to the arguments made against early FCE vehicles when horses were the primary mode of transportation. "What do you mean I have to stop and put fuel in it every 50 miles?! I can ride my horse all day!" "I have to plan my route so refueling stations are within range the whole way? That's crazy! The 'fuel' for my horse is everywhere!" "I have to keep this thing on the road? What if I want to go over a mountain or cross a stream with no bridge?! My horse can just walk across it!"
And yet, of all the people driving their cars around every day today, how many would give up ever using an FCE vehicle for a horse? In 50 years, people will look back on this time the same way we look at the transition from horse to FCE vehicle and wonder why anyone hung onto the old way of doing things.
My gas car says I have about 350 miles range when I fill up the tank. When I drive it at 80+ mph for 250 miles, it says I have 30 miles of range left. Range estimates change based on conditions unknown at the time of the original estimate. That's true for any vehicle. If the average Joe drives his car based on the initial range estimate rather than what it's currently telling him, he's an idiot and deserves to be stuck on the side of the road. That isn't the car's fault; it's the operator's.
As for recharge times, a Supercharge station will give you most of your charge back from 0 in the time it takes to eat lunch. Put them in restaurant and hotel parking lots and problem solved.
"Poor Mr. Broder" took an EV out for an 80mph joy ride with the heat blasting into the mid 70s with sub-freezing temps outside, undercharged the vehicle (and in at least one case, didn't charge it at all), and then complained when multiple instances of running the EV to near-empty finally resulted in a no-start condition because he turned the vehicle off while it was nearly dead.
It's a hit piece, plain and simple. The sooner Tesla gets a well respected, independent third party in to review all the collected data, the sooner the issue can be put to bed. From where I sit, this was a biased reporter who - at best - allowed personal opinions to completely ruin a story or - at worst - completely fabricated a hit piece with a shoddily constructed story without realizing Tesla could actually challenge his claims with real data. I think it's more a dumb reporter who doesn't understand this new-fangled technology and decided he didn't like it for whatever reason who then sputtered out non-sensical jibberish that completely failed to accurately educate readers.
I see that same thing happen every time I read a news story about science or technology that I understand well. Reporters seem to have very little attention to detail or regard for objective fact. As much as I see that pattern when it comes to news stories on topics I understand well, I find it hard to believe that all other reporting is spot-on. Likely, it's also the product of writers and editors who are as bad at their jobs as most people are.
I'm sorry, but at 125mph, your solution is... to ram the car?
If the vehicle is accelerating unexpectedly and beyond the control of the driver (or I guess, passenger at that point), getting close to it at all - particularly right up in front of it - is stupidly suicidal. You may as well suggest they shoot out his tires. That, at least, would put less lives in danger.
Tesla has the benefit of being the first ones out there with a real EV that works, so they have an opportunity to set the standard. They need to put as much as they possibly can into getting supercharging stations at every rest stop, restaurant, and hotel in and around population centers. You're going to spend 45 minutes eating at Denny's (or wherever) anyway. If you can plug in your Tesla and charge to nearly full while you do it? That's brilliant.
Once they have critical mass of infrastructure in place, they can charge a very small licensing fee to other EV manufacturers for the interface technology and set the major standard for the next couple decades while practically printing money along the way.
As for the Volt, it can't be "100% electric" if it has a gasoline engine. Just like the Prius and others, it's an EV until it isn't. That entire time, it's an overcomplicated bit of machinery trying to be all things to all people. I just hope Tesla manages to get their next model out soon since it's targeting under $30,000 with specs comparable to the Model S. That, I think, is where they have the opportunity to get huge.
Tesla's first car had a base price of $110,000. The founder and CEO of Tesla Motors stated that sales of that car would finance the R&D for a cheaper vehicle, which became the Model S. Base price starts about $52,000. The next stated target for Tesla Motors is an EV comparable to the Model S with a base price under $30,000.
Tesla's first customers were expensive toys for people who just want posh toys. The Model S is directly competing with BMW, Lexus, and others. Their customers for the Model S are middle class professionals; not just trust fund babies and hedge fund managers.
As for EV cars, the difference now is that Tesla is the first company to produce an EV that could actually function as a drop-in replacement for fuel-combustion vehicles. This is especially true if they can put together a functional business model for the promised 5-minute quick-change battery swap. If that happens, you're now talking about a car with comparable range to typical FCEs and a comparable refueling time to typical FCEs. That's definitely never existed before.
However, even with just the Quickcharge stations, Tesla has managed to make a car that recharges almost to full while you grab lunch. That's huge. They should put those at every Denny's and Marriott in the country.
The logs need to be released to a neutral and well respected third party. I strongly suspect they'll then report back that the NYT reporter is full of shit and the NYT will can the guy immediately while running a retraction on page C19, right under an ad for used peanut butter. The moment the fight starts making the NYT brand look less credible, the reporter goes under the bus and the story goes away.
He ran out of juice because he undercharged it on three separate occasions, the last of which had him going on a 60 mile trip with 30 miles of range showing on the car. He hadn't even bothered plugging in the vehicle the night before; merely let it sit in sub-freezing temperatures with very little juice left, then hopped in and went until it died, passing a supercharging station along the way.
What an asshole.
Really? He said he drove at 45mph with little to no heat. The car says he drove at 81 with the heat cranked up to over 70F in freezing temperatures where you'd be comfortable in the low to mid 60s.
Sounds like a real asshole to me.
Elon Musk launches rockets into outer fuckin' space. I think he can handle the NYT and one dumbass reporter.
$1000 says that reporter is on the unemployment line by the end of this month. He isn't worth the risk to the NYT brand.
Yes, and then three months later the same reporter pulls the same stunt with the same results using a car gained from another source. Then what do you do? Come back and claim it wasn't actually your support staff, but the reporter the whole time?
The best thing Musk can do is get some high-profile neutral third party to come in, look at the raw data, and publicly report that the NYT reporter is full of shit. The NYT would then likely throw the reporter under the bus to save the credibility of the brand (essentially doing what you're saying Tesla should do) and the whole thing ends up a huge, HUGE PR boost for Tesla and Musk.
Musk designed the first all-electric vehicle that's worth a damn and he sends freaking rockets into outer space. The fact that his cars actually work (Tesla Roadster has gotten great praise and Model S is winning all kinds of awards) and that his rockets actually go to outer space tells me the guy is in a better position to know what's going on than some idiot reporter.
"...drove the EV something like 2 miles into the heart of a major city with huge traffic congestion issues where it could take 45 minutes to move a mile..."
FTFY
Case in point:
http://gawker.com/5789444/guy-proves-childs-big-wheel-bike-is-faster-transportation-than-a-nyc-bus
A grown man riding a freaking big wheel went one mile in NYC in less time than the city's fleet of buses take to go the same route and distance. He not only beat the bus, he did so by two minutes. On a big wheel. That two miles looks a bit bigger now doesn't it?
But that isn't as much the point, is it? Per Musk's data from the Model S driven, the guy undercharged the car three separate times, sped like a maniac with the heat cranked up, and drove it around in circles in a parking lot trying to kill off the battery. He then responded to the accusations with basically a "nuh uhhhh!" when they had a freaking black box recording every single thing done in the entire vehicle.
This is the kind of crap you catch 10 year olds trying to pull on their parents.
Actually, you don't need both. It may be desirable to reach a balanced budget with a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases in order to lessen the blow from either, but either will work for balancing the budget. On the flip side, you could balance the budget entirely through revenue increases. Simply increase tax rates across the board until the budget is balanced. Done. Or you can simply cut spending until it's in line with revenues. An across-the-board (including all entitlements) cut of, say, 25% of spending will do that. Or you could cut all spending by 75% and have a large surplus. Or you could do an infinite number of combinations to reach any given stated goal.
The point being, the Tea Party folks may be calling for something that isn't necessarily healthy for the US economy, but they most certainly aren't calling for something that's impossible by any stretch of the imagination.
What part of releasing the raw logs from the vehicle to dispute a biased at best - outright fabrication at worst - is shooting the messenger?
The guy wrote an outright hit piece against the car. It would have been a damning piece of news, if only it were true.
If you're looking out the window for your enemy in a modern air combat situation, you're either about to die or lots of people screwed up in lots of ways.
Nobody has given much thought to non-BVR air combat in about 10 years and for good reason. First sight, first shot, first kill. That's the whole idea of stealth and advanced detection systems for fighters: I'm harder to see, so I see you first, so I shoot first, so I go home minus one long range missile. That's why a $140 Million F-22 makes more sense than three $40 Million Eurofighters. Once the fight is over, nobody got within 40 miles of an enemy and all you have to tally up is the cost of three planes and three trained fighter pilots versus the cost of three missiles and some gas.
Your first statement (which I'd agree with, as all countries have different reporting standards) moots your second. The reported rates are lower, but you need to be careful of a couple things. First, the UK Home Office has a nasty habit of separating statistics for England and Wales from Scotland and Norther Ireland. They do this because the stats for England and Wales are far, far better than those for the others (particularly Scotland).
Second, the UK Home Office statistics specifically on homicide reflect initial reports of homicides. In other words, if 10 people are killed in August, but the police don't find the bodies (or decide to rule them homicides) until January, the crime statistics reflect the homicides as occurring in the wrong year. As such, year-by-year statistics can vary widely and be quite inaccurate. The Home Office's own crime reports point this out, which is why I do.