All students getting unfirewalled public IPs (I shit you not)
I'm I the only person left who believes in a free (as in libre) internet?
What you're decribing is no less of a security hole than saying. "We discovered that this house had several ground floor windows....I shit you not!"
Of course it does! Those windows are there for a reason and very useful.
I hate it when some "very clever individual" decides the only way to have a "secure" network is cripple everyone's network connection.
If some fool had firewalled my network connection at College, it would have been 50% less useful.
No VNC, SSH, SFTP, HTTP, etc.
It would have been a huge pain in the ass.
And it wouldn't have been just me complaining. There are plently of students and faculty who need to be able to shuffle data back and forth between home/office and five different labs.
In my humble opinion, a dirty bomb would be less effective than a large mass of plastic explosive and easier to trace.
In a MILITARY campaign that would be entirely true, but if you're a terrorist, who has no illusions about being able to acutally kill all his adversaries, a "dirty bomb" would be much more effective.
The goal is to create terror, afterall, and nothing creates terror within my parent's generation like the word "nuclear". (I consider this to be the reason we have so few nuclear power plants despite the actual facts involved showing how much "safer" they are compared to a typical coal power plant.)
Suppose your father had worked for GM assembling cars and earning a decent wage for a decent day's work. What would have happened if a bunch of talented automotive hobbyists volunteered to assemble GM's cars for free? Wouldn't that have been likely to put your father out of work?
You see, the problem here is that you're looking at it as if there are only a handful of things that need to get done on this planet, and once they're done, we're all out of work.
Yes those voluteers would be taking your dad's job, BUT THE MONEY WOULD STILL EXIST TO PAY YOUR DAD TO DO SOMETHING ELSE.
The argument you're making is pretty much an argument for inefficiency. That type of "logic" says that doing ANYTHING cheaper and easier destroys jobs.
It's just not true. If I invent a machine that can create deck chairs out of thin air, yes I've just put a few people out of work, TEMPORARILY, but the net effect is positive. I've just added to the country's GDP. In any sort of sane economy, that's a GOOD thing. I means we all (collectively) have more money, and the money that was going to be spent on deck chairs will now be spent on something else, (which gives the deck-chair workers new jobs producing whatever that is).
In short, volunteer work is strictly a good thing. While it may sometimes accomplish a task that someone would otherwise be paid for, it does so without removing that money from the economy.
there are still laws that govern how we can obtain and use them - whether we agree with those laws or not (NOTE: I'm in the US, so YMMV).
Yes, and HOW DARE anybody state that those laws are morally unjust. In AMERICA of all places! Won't someone please think of the corporations!
Not paying money for music produced by long-dead artists to people who had no hand in actually creating it is just plain un-american!
But please don't give the RIAA any more ammo to declare my iPod a concealed audio weapon!
Forget about it. The RIAA has fought against just about every single new (recordable) format out there. ANYTHING that makes it possible for my brother's band to record their own album hurts them. It's not about piracy, it's about control.
If they had their choice, they'd send us back to the days when the ONLY way to distribute music was on a vinyl record. The RIAA want to keep their stranglehold no matter what and has even been convited of using criminal means to do so.
Not paying those guys is like not paying protection money to the mob. Society doesn't need them. They've been outmoded, and do nothing but act as a drain on the economy.
This is NOT an upgrade for your antenna. This doesn't increase gain, it just takes it from the back and adds to the front. The good thing about this method is it doesn't require you to modify your original antenna, so you don't have to worry about breaking FCC regulations on all equipment being certified.
Of course you're modifying the antenna.
Just because it's not permenant, does not mean you're not modifying it. Especially in the eyes of the FCC.
When I was younger reading was just about the ONLY way to educate yourself about something quickly and cheaply.
If you wanted to learn how to make homemade rocket engines or troubleshoot your car, you read a book. Now that information is on the internet.
It's really changed the way so many things work. The amount of information just a few mouse clicks away is just staggering.
I've also noticed a bit of a "generation gap" between my generation and many current college professors:
To them, researching a topic means going to the libray. To me, it means seaching the internet.
I hunt down a book only when I can't find what I want on the 'net.
I expect it will eventually change the entire academic scene significantly........I wonder which school will be the first to have students' theses switch to the form of a web page, freely accessible to all.
What's your point? The FCC deals with contracts. If a broadcaster violates his end of the contract, the FCC can freely revoke their liscence, IE not hold up its end of the contract. The fines are also part of being allowed to broadcast over the airwaves. This is not a judicial matter, it's a civil matter.
You're really missing the point here.
So there's a contract involved, big fucking deal.
We're talking about the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT retroactively changing it's rules.
This is obviously something the government is NOT supposed to do, and is forbidden by the constitution.
It really doesn't matter what semantics they use. Here's an example:
Congress passes a law creating a new government agency, and requiring that every citizen in the US must sign a contract with this agency.
This agency then retroactively changes it's contract to punish crimes before they were made illegal.
See the point?
It's nothing more than a shell game. It's a blatantly obvious violation of the constitution, and any rationalization why it's not is just silly.
The constitution is a contract between the government and the people of America and supercedes ALL other contracts.
No, broadcasting something doesn't put it in the public domain. That's actually one reason cited for requiring the broadcasters to keep copies, becasue it's technically illegal for viewer/listeners to do so (aside from time-shifting).
No, it's not.
You can tape whatever you want as long as you're legally allowed to receive it. It's perfectly legal for me to hit record. And I can play it back as many times as I want.
What I can't do, is redistribute what I've taped. (barring special circumstances, which would obviously include FCC violations, or real crimes that actually hurt people)
You're exactly right about getting kick-backs, as well as the fact that they collect royalties for every book they put out. My Biology teacher is friends with the author of my Biology book (this is the reason that we use it, actually) and he has stated that to stay current with the class, you need the new book.
Not every professor is like that though.
I actually had one professor who personally refunded the royalty portion of the price of a new book. It was amazing. Anyone who bought a new book, he handed $5. He didn't like making money off book sales to his students.
None of these cars have the new RFID chips in the keys to prevent theft. So, you can either drive a car likely to be on the "most stolen" list, or put up with some occasional interference that prevents you from using the remote to unlock the car.
Did you ever stop to think about how freakin COMMON those cars are?
Those figures are absolutely USELESS without knowing how many of them there are on the road.
In other news, most people who died in car accidents last year were of average height. Whopp-tee-doo!
See, if I parked my '86 Mazda RX-7 next to my '87 Buick LeSabre (same as Olds Cutlass, Pontiac 6000LE, etc). Which one do you think is more likely to ACTUALLY get stolen?
Think about it this way....
If every Ferrari Testarossa in the US we to be stolen, it still wouldn't make this list. The likelihood of YOU having YOUR car stolen would be 100%, yet it still wouldn't be listed as one of the "most stolen cars".
My point is that list is absolutely USELESS by itself as a means of determining the theft-resistance of a particular car. A proper comparison would take into account how many of each type of vehicle is on the road.
Sometimes, the military doesn't like the location of troops being revealed to anybody. They ban all cell phones and GPS devices that they don't control from being with such groups.
So, should a "winning" can be brought on such a mission, you've got a security hole... sure, the message is encrypted so that only Coca-Cola Prize Patrol knows where you are and hears what you say to them, but Coca-Cola Prize Patrol doesn't have security clearance now, do they?
Holy shit!
You just unknowingly figured out the soltuion to this whole problem...
If the gov't were to give the Coca-Cola Prize Partol a security clearance, that would solve everything!;)
In reality, this is a non-issue. These can DON'T look like normal coke cans, and have a button you must press to activate them.
If you've got people running around secure areas on a military base pressing buttons they're not sure about, you got much bigger problems than the "prize-patrol".
I had a lot of my nontechnical friends and family ask me about this when it first went around. They were concerned about the privacy issues. The money issue aside, your snide inside is really unfair, for two reasons:
No, I don't think so.
The old maxim really is true: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
You don't need to know shit about telephones to know that a random phone call offering to give you thousands of dollars might be a scam. Same for snail mail, or email. It's freakin common sense people!
While you're right that this particular issue does not warrant someone calling Ashcroft a Nazi, neither is it likely that they suddenly formed their opinion about Ashcroft from this single incident. Furthermore, the Bush administration has more parallels with Hitler's Nazi administration than any US administration since, and Ashcroft is probably one of the most similar figures -- he is uber-authoritarian, promotes the idea of the government setting the people's ethics, advocates large-scale domestic spying and analysis, opposes oversight of the government by the administration, plays fear games with "terrorists" as a boogeyman, and has steadily pushed for and recieved unprescedented police powers.
Cases such as this one are almost always suspended to avoid repurcussions in the future. If they sentence wasn't suspended Microsoft would say that the verdict was decided before the case began.
Which is when the judge would laugh and say:
"Yes, you're right. The verdict HAS already been decided and you are now appealing it. You think that with your kind of money, you could at least hire some lawyers who at least understand the legal process."
Seriously though, it's blindingly obvious that Microsoft is guilty, so I would think this is a bit unusual. If it's blindingly obvious that someone is guilty of murder, do they get to walk the streets while they're on appeal?
Moore claims that the president put those kids at risk because the president could have been a target in such a crisis, but he was a moving target and the hijackers only went after stationary ones.
I think any reasonable person would have to consider an airplane a "moving target". There were several of those destroyed on 9/11.
It's a debatable issue whether the president should have cut his visit to the classroom short when he was told that a second plane had hit the second tower. The principal of the school says that Bush did the right thing because running out of the classroom would have scared the kids...
Not really. Every hear the phrase "the buck stops here". The second he heard about anything THAT important, he should have AT LEAST checked to make sure SOMEBODY was on top of it.
If he wanted to delegate that to someone else for a while while he talks to a few kids, that's fine, but sitting there and not making ANY decision is not cool, especially when there are lives on the line.
Flight AA77 hit the Pentagon at 9:38 AM. That means Bush had a whole 1/2 hour to say "Shoot down any aircraft you need to."
If that was a fire chief in that classroom, do you really think he would have sat there "so the kids don't get worried"? He would have ran off to do his job.
He would have said "Sorry, gotta run!" and been out of there. If would be absolutely stupid for him to sit there and let a house burn because his leaving the room might upset of few kids.
their monopoly and the choke hold on the market is coming to an end. we don't need no stinkin' corrupt legislation/lobbying to bring that about.
And on a similar note:
Why do we waste all this effort thring to stop a guy who's shooting people? He'd run out of bullets eventually.
That type of attitude is silly. The government exists for EXACTLY these type of situations.
Someone is acting illegally. A government is acting to stop that. If a government is not going to act to enforce the laws it creates, how the FUCK is it going to affect anything?
You're not even putting forth some sort of reasonable objection to anti-trust laws, you're just saying the government should not act on the off chance that the problem MIGHT fix itself.
If you had a hole in the roof of your house, and materials had been monopolized and were too expensive at the moment, would you be willing to wait for the market to sort it out or would you want the problem fixed ASAP?
I think I can speak for 90+% of the people here when I say that my computer is a vital part of my job. The Microsoft monopoly is a significant problem for most of us and I want it fixed ASAP. Every day that it is not fixed hurts the global economy and helps Microsoft.
When anyone appeals a judgement against them, the sentence is suspended until the outcome of the appeal - when the verdict is in doubt (it's being appealled), you shouldn't be punished.
If MS loses the appeal, then the judgement will be reinstated. This is normal.
You're missing two key points:
Some of the penalties are only useful during a limited time period. For example: What good would an IE-free version of Windows 98 be to any of us right now? This SHOULD be a key consideration in decision, but I doubt it was.
Suspending the sentence is only done if the appeal is considered likely to succeed, it is NOT done in all cases. If it was thought with a high degree of certainty that the judgement was going to stick, the sentence would not be suspended.
|Oddly, the TZero is one of the more practical electric cars out there, but not because of speed (and certainly not because of price) -- it has a range of almost 300 miles on a single charge. That's the same range I get out of my Nissan SE-R on a single tank, more or less.
No the range is only 100 miles, and then only if you drive "very carefully".
Did you know every 2-3 years you would need to spend $3000 just on new batteries? The car is insanely expensive both to buy AND maintain.
Also, it's powered by a bank of laptop batteries, no kidding. Clever, that.
No, it's powered by spiral-cell lead acid batteries. See the features page.
In any case, this vehicle would be much cooler with NiMH batteries. The gravimetric energy density of NiMH are betwen 60-120 Wh/kg, as opposed to 30-50 for Pb-acid. So you could pack more than twice the energy in the same weight, and be talking about a 50-100 mile range instead of 20-40 miles. A NiMH battery would cost twice as much, but probably last at least twice as long, so the lifetime costs would be comparable, and the environmental costs would be much smaller.
A well thought out post, but you forgot to account for the internal resistence of the different battery types. NiMH batteries have a "high" internal resistence, which makes them somewhat inefficient in high-current applications (this is why most cordless powertools still use NiCad cells).
Also, FYI, in the US lead acid batteries are already recycled quite well. You made a good point about the assosciated mining though.
According to this site, electric cars produce less emissions even when you count the power plant emissions.
I took a look at that site but I don't buy it.
The process for an electric car goes:
Chemical energy(possible after refinement)=>mechanical energy=>electrical energy=>long distance power transmission=>voltage conversion=>chemical energy=>electical energy=>mechanical energy
While it's true that some of these processes can fairly efficient, others are bound to loose a signifcant amount of energy.
For example, the site you linked to mentioned no losses from long distance power transmission (7.4% at the grid level) or voltage conversion, etc.
They also seem willing to make some rather strange logical leaps to support their cause, as well possible deliberate omissions.
An example of this would be their choice of a 1995 model year vehicle, one year before the government-mandated OBDII engine control standard went into effect (reducing emissions).
I would be really interested to see a less biased study on the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
All students getting unfirewalled public IPs (I shit you not)
I'm I the only person left who believes in a free (as in libre) internet?
What you're decribing is no less of a security hole than saying. "We discovered that this house had several ground floor windows....I shit you not!"
Of course it does! Those windows are there for a reason and very useful.
I hate it when some "very clever individual" decides the only way to have a "secure" network is cripple everyone's network connection.
If some fool had firewalled my network connection at College, it would have been 50% less useful.
No VNC, SSH, SFTP, HTTP, etc.
It would have been a huge pain in the ass.
And it wouldn't have been just me complaining. There are plently of students and faculty who need to be able to shuffle data back and forth between home/office and five different labs.
THE GOAL IS NOT SECURITY AT *ANY* COST.
In my humble opinion, a dirty bomb would be less effective than a large mass of plastic explosive and easier to trace.
In a MILITARY campaign that would be entirely true, but if you're a terrorist, who has no illusions about being able to acutally kill all his adversaries, a "dirty bomb" would be much more effective.
The goal is to create terror, afterall, and nothing creates terror within my parent's generation like the word "nuclear". (I consider this to be the reason we have so few nuclear power plants despite the actual facts involved showing how much "safer" they are compared to a typical coal power plant.)
It's all about fear.
Suppose your father had worked for GM assembling cars and earning a decent wage for a decent day's work. What would have happened if a bunch of talented automotive hobbyists volunteered to assemble GM's cars for free? Wouldn't that have been likely to put your father out of work?
You see, the problem here is that you're looking at it as if there are only a handful of things that need to get done on this planet, and once they're done, we're all out of work.
Yes those voluteers would be taking your dad's job, BUT THE MONEY WOULD STILL EXIST TO PAY YOUR DAD TO DO SOMETHING ELSE.
The argument you're making is pretty much an argument for inefficiency. That type of "logic" says that doing ANYTHING cheaper and easier destroys jobs.
It's just not true. If I invent a machine that can create deck chairs out of thin air, yes I've just put a few people out of work, TEMPORARILY, but the net effect is positive. I've just added to the country's GDP. In any sort of sane economy, that's a GOOD thing. I means we all (collectively) have more money, and the money that was going to be spent on deck chairs will now be spent on something else, (which gives the deck-chair workers new jobs producing whatever that is).
In short, volunteer work is strictly a good thing. While it may sometimes accomplish a task that someone would otherwise be paid for, it does so without removing that money from the economy.
there are still laws that govern how we can obtain and use them - whether we agree with those laws or not (NOTE: I'm in the US, so YMMV).
Yes, and HOW DARE anybody state that those laws are morally unjust. In AMERICA of all places! Won't someone please think of the corporations!
Not paying money for music produced by long-dead artists to people who had no hand in actually creating it is just plain un-american!
But please don't give the RIAA any more ammo to declare my iPod a concealed audio weapon!
Forget about it. The RIAA has fought against just about every single new (recordable) format out there. ANYTHING that makes it possible for my brother's band to record their own album hurts them. It's not about piracy, it's about control.
If they had their choice, they'd send us back to the days when the ONLY way to distribute music was on a vinyl record. The RIAA want to keep their stranglehold no matter what and has even been convited of using criminal means to do so.
Not paying those guys is like not paying protection money to the mob. Society doesn't need them. They've been outmoded, and do nothing but act as a drain on the economy.
This is NOT an upgrade for your antenna. This doesn't increase gain, it just takes it from the back and adds to the front. The good thing about this method is it doesn't require you to modify your original antenna, so you don't have to worry about breaking FCC regulations on all equipment being certified.
Of course you're modifying the antenna.
Just because it's not permenant, does not mean you're not modifying it. Especially in the eyes of the FCC.
When I was younger reading was just about the ONLY way to educate yourself about something quickly and cheaply.
.......I wonder which school will be the first to have students' theses switch to the form of a web page, freely accessible to all.
If you wanted to learn how to make homemade rocket engines or troubleshoot your car, you read a book.
Now that information is on the internet.
It's really changed the way so many things work. The amount of information just a few mouse clicks away is just staggering.
I've also noticed a bit of a "generation gap" between my generation and many current college professors:
To them, researching a topic means going to the libray. To me, it means seaching the internet.
I hunt down a book only when I can't find what I want on the 'net.
I expect it will eventually change the entire academic scene significantly.
Maybe I'm just not creative enough, but what would a non-terrorist organization want with a cruise missile?
:)
...you aren't a terrorist are you?
Why, to use it on terrorists of course
Legally, could you redistribute it to people that were allowed to get it in the first place but didn't recorded it for whatever reason ?
I believe you can legally hand someone your copy, free of charge, but you can't sell it or make extra copies to give away.
IANAL
What's your point? The FCC deals with contracts. If a broadcaster violates his end of the contract, the FCC can freely revoke their liscence, IE not hold up its end of the contract. The fines are also part of being allowed to broadcast over the airwaves. This is not a judicial matter, it's a civil matter.
You're really missing the point here.
So there's a contract involved, big fucking deal.
We're talking about the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT retroactively changing it's rules.
This is obviously something the government is NOT supposed to do, and is forbidden by the constitution.
It really doesn't matter what semantics they use. Here's an example:
Congress passes a law creating a new government agency, and requiring that every citizen in the US must sign a contract with this agency.
This agency then retroactively changes it's contract to punish crimes before they were made illegal.
See the point?
It's nothing more than a shell game. It's a blatantly obvious violation of the constitution, and any rationalization why it's not is just silly.
The constitution is a contract between the government and the people of America and supercedes ALL other contracts.
No, broadcasting something doesn't put it in the public domain. That's actually one reason cited for requiring the broadcasters to keep copies, becasue it's technically illegal for viewer/listeners to do so (aside from time-shifting).
No, it's not.
You can tape whatever you want as long as you're legally allowed to receive it. It's perfectly legal for me to hit record. And I can play it back as many times as I want.
What I can't do, is redistribute what I've taped. (barring special circumstances, which would obviously include FCC violations, or real crimes that actually hurt people)
You're exactly right about getting kick-backs, as well as the fact that they collect royalties for every book they put out. My Biology teacher is friends with the author of my Biology book (this is the reason that we use it, actually) and he has stated that to stay current with the class, you need the new book.
Not every professor is like that though.
I actually had one professor who personally refunded the royalty portion of the price of a new book. It was amazing. Anyone who bought a new book, he handed $5. He didn't like making money off book sales to his students.
He's a very nice guy.
Did you ever stop to think about how freakin COMMON those cars are?
Those figures are absolutely USELESS without knowing how many of them there are on the road.
In other news, most people who died in car accidents last year were of average height. Whopp-tee-doo!
See, if I parked my '86 Mazda RX-7 next to my '87 Buick LeSabre (same as Olds Cutlass, Pontiac 6000LE, etc). Which one do you think is more likely to ACTUALLY get stolen?
Think about it this way....
If every Ferrari Testarossa in the US we to be stolen, it still wouldn't make this list. The likelihood of YOU having YOUR car stolen would be 100%, yet it still wouldn't be listed as one of the "most stolen cars".
My point is that list is absolutely USELESS by itself as a means of determining the theft-resistance of a particular car. A proper comparison would take into account how many of each type of vehicle is on the road.
Sometimes, the military doesn't like the location of troops being revealed to anybody. They ban all cell phones and GPS devices that they don't control from being with such groups. So, should a "winning" can be brought on such a mission, you've got a security hole... sure, the message is encrypted so that only Coca-Cola Prize Patrol knows where you are and hears what you say to them, but Coca-Cola Prize Patrol doesn't have security clearance now, do they?
;)
Holy shit!
You just unknowingly figured out the soltuion to this whole problem...
If the gov't were to give the Coca-Cola Prize Partol a security clearance, that would solve everything!
In reality, this is a non-issue. These can DON'T look like normal coke cans, and have a button you must press to activate them.
If you've got people running around secure areas on a military base pressing buttons they're not sure about, you got much bigger problems than the "prize-patrol".
I had a lot of my nontechnical friends and family ask me about this when it first went around. They were concerned about the privacy issues. The money issue aside, your snide inside is really unfair, for two reasons:
No, I don't think so.
The old maxim really is true:
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
You don't need to know shit about telephones to know that a random phone call offering to give you thousands of dollars might be a scam. Same for snail mail, or email.
It's freakin common sense people!
While you're right that this particular issue does not warrant someone calling Ashcroft a Nazi, neither is it likely that they suddenly formed their opinion about Ashcroft from this single incident. Furthermore, the Bush administration has more parallels with Hitler's Nazi administration than any US administration since, and Ashcroft is probably one of the most similar figures -- he is uber-authoritarian, promotes the idea of the government setting the people's ethics, advocates large-scale domestic spying and analysis, opposes oversight of the government by the administration, plays fear games with "terrorists" as a boogeyman, and has steadily pushed for and recieved unprescedented police powers.
You forgot to mention that he is ALSO refusing to turn over information regarding the torture of Iraqi prisoners, in violation of a congressional order.
What amazes me is that Ashcroft isn't in jail, right now: Violating congressional orders, perjury, holding US citizens without trial....
What the hell does this guy have to do before someone stops him?
If you see the footage where Ashcroft refuses to turn of over the information, it truly amazing.
Cases such as this one are almost always suspended to avoid repurcussions in the future. If they sentence wasn't suspended Microsoft would say that the verdict was decided before the case began.
Which is when the judge would laugh and say:
"Yes, you're right. The verdict HAS already been decided and you are now appealing it. You think that with your kind of money, you could at least hire some lawyers who at least understand the legal process."
Seriously though, it's blindingly obvious that Microsoft is guilty, so I would think this is a bit unusual. If it's blindingly obvious that someone is guilty of murder, do they get to walk the streets while they're on appeal?
I'm Canadian, and having spent a lot of time in the U.S., I knew you were "a bunch of obnoxious idiots" long before I ever heard about Michael Moore.
Geee......did you even think maybe you have trouble getting along with americans because of your attitude?
People in just about ANY country can be pretty nice, so long as neither one of you is a prejudiced asshole.
Moore claims that the president put those kids at risk because the president could have been a target in such a crisis, but he was a moving target and the hijackers only went after stationary ones.
I think any reasonable person would have to consider an airplane a "moving target". There were several of those destroyed on 9/11.
It's a debatable issue whether the president should have cut his visit to the classroom short when he was told that a second plane had hit the second tower. The principal of the school says that Bush did the right thing because running out of the classroom would have scared the kids...
Not really. Every hear the phrase "the buck stops here". The second he heard about anything THAT important, he should have AT LEAST checked to make sure SOMEBODY was on top of it.
If he wanted to delegate that to someone else for a while while he talks to a few kids, that's fine, but sitting there and not making ANY decision is not cool, especially when there are lives on the line.
Flight AA77 hit the Pentagon at 9:38 AM. That means Bush had a whole 1/2 hour to say "Shoot down any aircraft you need to."
If that was a fire chief in that classroom, do you really think he would have sat there "so the kids don't get worried"? He would have ran off to do his job.
He would have said "Sorry, gotta run!" and been out of there. If would be absolutely stupid for him to sit there and let a house burn because his leaving the room might upset of few kids.
their monopoly and the choke hold on the market is coming to an end. we don't need no stinkin' corrupt legislation/lobbying to bring that about.
And on a similar note:
Why do we waste all this effort thring to stop a guy who's shooting people? He'd run out of bullets eventually.
That type of attitude is silly. The government exists for EXACTLY these type of situations.
Someone is acting illegally. A government is acting to stop that. If a government is not going to act to enforce the laws it creates, how the FUCK is it going to affect anything?
You're not even putting forth some sort of reasonable objection to anti-trust laws, you're just saying the government should not act on the off chance that the problem MIGHT fix itself.
If you had a hole in the roof of your house, and materials had been monopolized and were too expensive at the moment, would you be willing to wait for the market to sort it out or would you want the problem fixed ASAP?
I think I can speak for 90+% of the people here when I say that my computer is a vital part of my job. The Microsoft monopoly is a significant problem for most of us and I want it fixed ASAP. Every day that it is not fixed hurts the global economy and helps Microsoft.
You're missing two key points:
|Oddly, the TZero is one of the more practical electric cars out there, but not because of speed (and certainly not because of price) -- it has a range of almost 300 miles on a single charge. That's the same range I get out of my Nissan SE-R on a single tank, more or less.
No the range is only 100 miles, and then only if you drive "very carefully".
Did you know every 2-3 years you would need to spend $3000 just on new batteries? The car is insanely expensive both to buy AND maintain.
Also, it's powered by a bank of laptop batteries, no kidding. Clever, that.
No, it's powered by spiral-cell lead acid batteries. See the features page.
And as car as I know, there isn't a fuel cell design for a car that isn't for an electric car.
I wasn't as specfic as I meant to be. I should have said: battery-powered electric cars.
I consider a car that charges a battery "electric", but I would call a hydrogen/alcohol fuel cell powered car, "(energy source) powered."
While fuel cell powered vehicles use electric motors, it's more on an implementation detail.
In any case, this vehicle would be much cooler with NiMH batteries. The gravimetric energy density of NiMH are betwen 60-120 Wh/kg, as opposed to 30-50 for Pb-acid. So you could pack more than twice the energy in the same weight, and be talking about a 50-100 mile range instead of 20-40 miles. A NiMH battery would cost twice as much, but probably last at least twice as long, so the lifetime costs would be comparable, and the environmental costs would be much smaller.
A well thought out post, but you forgot to account for the internal resistence of the different battery types. NiMH batteries have a "high" internal resistence, which makes them somewhat inefficient in high-current applications (this is why most cordless powertools still use NiCad cells).
Also, FYI, in the US lead acid batteries are already recycled quite well. You made a good point about the assosciated mining though.
According to this site, electric cars produce less emissions even when you count the power plant emissions.
I took a look at that site but I don't buy it.
The process for an electric car goes:
Chemical energy(possible after refinement)=>mechanical energy=>electrical energy=>long distance power transmission=>voltage conversion=>chemical energy=>electical energy=>mechanical energy
While it's true that some of these processes can fairly efficient, others are bound to loose a signifcant amount of energy.
For example, the site you linked to mentioned no losses from long distance power transmission (7.4% at the grid level) or voltage conversion, etc.
They also seem willing to make some rather strange logical leaps to support their cause, as well possible deliberate omissions.
An example of this would be their choice of a 1995 model year vehicle, one year before the government-mandated OBDII engine control standard went into effect (reducing emissions).
I would be really interested to see a less biased study on the matter.
"How often are they replaced?" :)
Probably as often as other car batteries
Actually, it's more likely that they would need to be replaced signifcantly more often, as they would go through much deeper charge/discharge cycles.
In normal car, the only time you're actually discharging the battery is when you're drawing power AND the engine isn't running.