I totally agree that having to jailbreak your phone is crappy, and I completely understand people rejecting Apple products because of this. But it's just not correct to say that you CAN'T hack an iPhone.
Lots (and lots) of plug-in hybrids and straight up electrics are going to be hitting showrooms within the next few years - the Nissan Leaf is all-electric, and the Chevy Volt is a plug-in hybrid. Switching to electricity for transportation (at least a big chunk of it) will be easy.
The real issue with nuclear power is less the fact that environmentalists are against it and more that nuclear power simply isn't very profitable. The nuclear industry has a sordid history of colossal engineering failures, cost overruns, and the like... which means investors are really leery of ponying up the enormous amount of cash required to get one off the ground. Remember that a few months ago the gov't announced huge new load guarantees to the nuclear industry? And now we're seeing a bunch of interest in new nuclear plants? Hint: these two events are related more than coincidentally.
The loan guarantee thing isn't bad, but what would be even better would be to get a damn cap & trade or carbon taxation plan going. That would cut the legs out from under the coal fired electricity business, and provide a boost to nuclear, solar and wind. Then we could stop knocking down entire mountains and spewing loads of pollutants into the atmosphere. The market would sort out the best mix among the big three non-fossil power sources.
My guess is that you'd have at least as high a chance of having a stuck accelerator due to a stuck throttle cable is you would as a result of computer error. In fact, I'm betting that the purely mechanical system would be significantly more likely to have this problem.
Any kind of unexpected input has the potential to cause unexpected outputs. The whole Y2k thing is a prime example. The issue was there all along, but didn't manifest itself until years with final two digits > 99 started showing up in various data fields. And that was a fairly obvious problem. Cars have a fairly large number of sensors and input devices - it would be all but impossible to find and check every possible case through either analysis or testing.
Yeah, in this case, the problem was probably driver error. But the GP's claim is still incorrect.
Imagine a boolean value in a memory address IS_BRAKE_ON = 1 getting flipped to 0.
If there was any kind of safety engineering applied to this at all, this wouldn't be possible. Processing involving IS_BRAKE_ON would be flagged as "safety critical", and it's standard practice not to allow such values to be represented by single-bit numbers. In fact, best practice is to not allow the true/false states to be the inverse of each other: so you shouldn't have TRUE represented by 1111 and FALSE represented by 0000, for example. Yes, IAASE (I am a safety engineer).
... with a boulder of salt. The fact is that people absolutely, positively, cannot keep their mouths shut, and the chance of a conspiracy being revealed goes up exponentially with the number of people involved. Something like this would require way too many people to keep quiet - which isn't happening.
Jail. Break. The iPhone is just as hackable as other systems out there.
Not trying to be an Apple apologist here, as I share the distaste for Big Steve's control freakery. But seriously, if you have a mind to hack your iPhone, it's highly doable. People have gotten Android running on it, for heaven's sake.
For some things (not including cut & paste from the get-go, say), they can get away with this tactic. But stonewalling in the face of an issue this big is likely to blow up in their faces.
If you shatter that illusion by admitting wrong, they'll spit in your face as they walk away.
Dude, most people are not depending on Apple to find out about problems with Apple's products. The illusion is already shattered (or in the process of shattering). Continuing to deny the problem at this point makes them look both clueless and evil, and is going to cause more problems than it solves.
Can't recall the exact quote, but it was to the effect that the iPhone excelled in almost every area... except actually making, you know, phone calls. On that basis, it's not hard to understand why they couldn't recommend it, being as how they were reviewing a telephone. It's hard to imagine how anyone would conclude that a particular model of phone is right for them if the making calls function works poorly. If you didn't care about making calls, you'd buy an iPod touch.
If every household had four plasma TVs all going at once, you bet your sweet ass it would strain the grid. If electric cars become as ubiquitous as gasoline-powered cars, it WILL strain the grid. Residential power consumption averages about 1KW already. Another 2kW load for several hours is going to make a big difference.
Daytime residential loads run around 2.5 kw sustained (or higher, depending on the season and where you live), with much higher peaks when you do things like run the dryer. I guarantee that the power distro system is capable of handling a bunch of extra 2kw night-time loads (when the typical house is running in the hundreds of watts range). Not only that, but the advent of smart metering will allow cars to serve as an emergency temporary SOURCE of power during peak load times - they actually help STABILIZE the grid. Will we require additional GENERATION capability? Almost certainly. But it's not like everyone is going to be replacing their gas-fired car tomorrow - we have years to get ready for this. And if part of "getting ready" includes promotion of home solar systems, then you solve a bunch of problems all at once.
The kind of car we're talking about is like a Mazda Leaf, which has an engine rated at 80 kw. Of course, it's not going to be running at it's rated capacity for for very long - I'm thinking that over the course of a commute, it's going to average more like 10 kw (I think your estimate of a 45 kw average for your car is almost certainly high, btw, and this car has a lot of energy conservation features like regenerative braking that yours does not). Nissan estimates that the battery could be fully charged in in 8 hours (with the 220 v connector). If your round trip commute is 1.5 hours (90 miles, which something like 90% of all Americans fall under), you'd burn 1.5 hours * 10 kw = 15 kwh. At a charging rate of 2 kw, that's easily do-able in 8 hours.
Bottom line: of course YOUR car couldn't take on enough electricity at 2 kw to perform adequately. These cars are not like yours.
Or for business, power purchase agreements. Since local generation is typically net-metered, that means your solar PV plant is sold back at the higher rate first (assuming you're using more than 500 kwh)... and pays back faster.
I can't believe you don't understand these units - a plasma television worth of electricity is equivalent to 1.7 Olympic swimming pools... full of electrons... or something.
The article, in its clumsy way, is trying to point out that the electrical distribution system can handle an added 2 kw load per house. Power generation is a different issue - massive adoption of electric vehicles will require additional generation capacity. But that's the point - we want to substitute relatively clean (and oh, by the way, cheaper) electricity for dirty, more expensive (and oh, by the way, imported from the middle east or drilled off the coast of Louisiana) petroleum products. Using more clean electricity and less gas is a GOOD thing.
Turn on your dryer... you're almost certainly burning over 2 kw. Oh, you also have your lights on? And the TV? And the air conditioning is running? You can be pulling 8 or 10 kw really easily. I agree that this is kind of a dumb comparison (I think plasma TVs just became the new Slashdot unit for power, alongside Libraries of Congress for data), but in terms of pure numbers... your home electricity distro system won't melt down from plugging one of these in.
One is distribution, and I can pretty much promise that there's no issue there. If it's correct that 2 kw is the charging load, your existing home distro system can handle that with ease, even during the day, and these should normally be charged at night.
The other is new electricity demand, and yes, these systems will cause an increase in total electrical demand. But that's the point - we want to substitute efficiently generated and transmitted electricity for dirtier ICE engines. That means we'll need new (clean) electrical sources, whether those be nuclear, solar, wind, or whatever. But at any reasonable rate of uptake, we should be capable of bringing new capacity online in plenty of time.
If the article is correct in that 2 kilowatts is the power draw from these things, I can't believe there's an issue. Your house is already full of devices drawing more power than that - starting with your dryer. The other day I was running the washer, dryer, dishwasher, some lights, and the a/c was running - I was pulling down like 8 kw (as measured by my whole-house power meter). A 2 kw load at night won't faze your distro system.
And yes, it's a real problem. But in this particular case, it's likely that improved soldering alloys are going to solve this problem without needing to go back to lead. There's already been quite a lot of progress in this area.
There are a bunch of costs besides the labor - you'd have to acquire the land, which is going to be extremely expensive because it's by definition on the waterfront. Then you'd need a bunch of capital equipment, engineering services, environmental studies, etc, etc. You'd also have to figure out what to do with the dirt you dug up, which is a harder problem than it sounds like - it costs money to move it somewhere, and you can't (generally) just dump it at sea.
While I'm a hundred percent in favor of having the government just put people to work on useful projects like this, this particular one really isn't cheap.
... I bought one of these, and based on watching my loads over time, 2 kilowatts is no big deal at all. My dryer uses way more power than that. In fact, an electric toaster uses over a kilowatt. So not only could you charge an electric SUV, you could charge an electric freaking train and still have enough capacity to spare.
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I totally agree that having to jailbreak your phone is crappy, and I completely understand people rejecting Apple products because of this. But it's just not correct to say that you CAN'T hack an iPhone.
Lots (and lots) of plug-in hybrids and straight up electrics are going to be hitting showrooms within the next few years - the Nissan Leaf is all-electric, and the Chevy Volt is a plug-in hybrid. Switching to electricity for transportation (at least a big chunk of it) will be easy.
The real issue with nuclear power is less the fact that environmentalists are against it and more that nuclear power simply isn't very profitable. The nuclear industry has a sordid history of colossal engineering failures, cost overruns, and the like... which means investors are really leery of ponying up the enormous amount of cash required to get one off the ground. Remember that a few months ago the gov't announced huge new load guarantees to the nuclear industry? And now we're seeing a bunch of interest in new nuclear plants? Hint: these two events are related more than coincidentally.
The loan guarantee thing isn't bad, but what would be even better would be to get a damn cap & trade or carbon taxation plan going. That would cut the legs out from under the coal fired electricity business, and provide a boost to nuclear, solar and wind. Then we could stop knocking down entire mountains and spewing loads of pollutants into the atmosphere. The market would sort out the best mix among the big three non-fossil power sources.
So, your car is the mirror universe equivalent of KITT?
My guess is that you'd have at least as high a chance of having a stuck accelerator due to a stuck throttle cable is you would as a result of computer error. In fact, I'm betting that the purely mechanical system would be significantly more likely to have this problem.
Any kind of unexpected input has the potential to cause unexpected outputs. The whole Y2k thing is a prime example. The issue was there all along, but didn't manifest itself until years with final two digits > 99 started showing up in various data fields. And that was a fairly obvious problem. Cars have a fairly large number of sensors and input devices - it would be all but impossible to find and check every possible case through either analysis or testing.
Yeah, in this case, the problem was probably driver error. But the GP's claim is still incorrect.
If there was any kind of safety engineering applied to this at all, this wouldn't be possible. Processing involving IS_BRAKE_ON would be flagged as "safety critical", and it's standard practice not to allow such values to be represented by single-bit numbers. In fact, best practice is to not allow the true/false states to be the inverse of each other: so you shouldn't have TRUE represented by 1111 and FALSE represented by 0000, for example. Yes, IAASE (I am a safety engineer).
... with a boulder of salt. The fact is that people absolutely, positively, cannot keep their mouths shut, and the chance of a conspiracy being revealed goes up exponentially with the number of people involved. Something like this would require way too many people to keep quiet - which isn't happening.
Jail. Break. The iPhone is just as hackable as other systems out there.
Not trying to be an Apple apologist here, as I share the distaste for Big Steve's control freakery. But seriously, if you have a mind to hack your iPhone, it's highly doable. People have gotten Android running on it, for heaven's sake.
Oh, so that explains perfectly why their market share is increasing. Thanks for that incisive explanation.
For some things (not including cut & paste from the get-go, say), they can get away with this tactic. But stonewalling in the face of an issue this big is likely to blow up in their faces.
Dude, most people are not depending on Apple to find out about problems with Apple's products. The illusion is already shattered (or in the process of shattering). Continuing to deny the problem at this point makes them look both clueless and evil, and is going to cause more problems than it solves.
Can't recall the exact quote, but it was to the effect that the iPhone excelled in almost every area... except actually making, you know, phone calls. On that basis, it's not hard to understand why they couldn't recommend it, being as how they were reviewing a telephone. It's hard to imagine how anyone would conclude that a particular model of phone is right for them if the making calls function works poorly. If you didn't care about making calls, you'd buy an iPod touch.
Yes, they're trying to sell subscriptions. So how does that make them not impartial? Impartiality is what they're SELLING.
I'm still likely to take the plunge, but mostly because the 3G phone is pretty damn slow. If I had a GS I'd probably skip this iteration.
Daytime residential loads run around 2.5 kw sustained (or higher, depending on the season and where you live), with much higher peaks when you do things like run the dryer. I guarantee that the power distro system is capable of handling a bunch of extra 2kw night-time loads (when the typical house is running in the hundreds of watts range). Not only that, but the advent of smart metering will allow cars to serve as an emergency temporary SOURCE of power during peak load times - they actually help STABILIZE the grid. Will we require additional GENERATION capability? Almost certainly. But it's not like everyone is going to be replacing their gas-fired car tomorrow - we have years to get ready for this. And if part of "getting ready" includes promotion of home solar systems, then you solve a bunch of problems all at once.
The kind of car we're talking about is like a Mazda Leaf, which has an engine rated at 80 kw. Of course, it's not going to be running at it's rated capacity for for very long - I'm thinking that over the course of a commute, it's going to average more like 10 kw (I think your estimate of a 45 kw average for your car is almost certainly high, btw, and this car has a lot of energy conservation features like regenerative braking that yours does not). Nissan estimates that the battery could be fully charged in in 8 hours (with the 220 v connector). If your round trip commute is 1.5 hours (90 miles, which something like 90% of all Americans fall under), you'd burn 1.5 hours * 10 kw = 15 kwh. At a charging rate of 2 kw, that's easily do-able in 8 hours.
Bottom line: of course YOUR car couldn't take on enough electricity at 2 kw to perform adequately. These cars are not like yours.
Or for business, power purchase agreements. Since local generation is typically net-metered, that means your solar PV plant is sold back at the higher rate first (assuming you're using more than 500 kwh)... and pays back faster.
I can't believe you don't understand these units - a plasma television worth of electricity is equivalent to 1.7 Olympic swimming pools... full of electrons... or something.
The article, in its clumsy way, is trying to point out that the electrical distribution system can handle an added 2 kw load per house. Power generation is a different issue - massive adoption of electric vehicles will require additional generation capacity. But that's the point - we want to substitute relatively clean (and oh, by the way, cheaper) electricity for dirty, more expensive (and oh, by the way, imported from the middle east or drilled off the coast of Louisiana) petroleum products. Using more clean electricity and less gas is a GOOD thing.
Turn on your dryer... you're almost certainly burning over 2 kw. Oh, you also have your lights on? And the TV? And the air conditioning is running? You can be pulling 8 or 10 kw really easily. I agree that this is kind of a dumb comparison (I think plasma TVs just became the new Slashdot unit for power, alongside Libraries of Congress for data), but in terms of pure numbers... your home electricity distro system won't melt down from plugging one of these in.
One is distribution, and I can pretty much promise that there's no issue there. If it's correct that 2 kw is the charging load, your existing home distro system can handle that with ease, even during the day, and these should normally be charged at night.
The other is new electricity demand, and yes, these systems will cause an increase in total electrical demand. But that's the point - we want to substitute efficiently generated and transmitted electricity for dirtier ICE engines. That means we'll need new (clean) electrical sources, whether those be nuclear, solar, wind, or whatever. But at any reasonable rate of uptake, we should be capable of bringing new capacity online in plenty of time.
If the article is correct in that 2 kilowatts is the power draw from these things, I can't believe there's an issue. Your house is already full of devices drawing more power than that - starting with your dryer. The other day I was running the washer, dryer, dishwasher, some lights, and the a/c was running - I was pulling down like 8 kw (as measured by my whole-house power meter). A 2 kw load at night won't faze your distro system.
And yes, it's a real problem. But in this particular case, it's likely that improved soldering alloys are going to solve this problem without needing to go back to lead. There's already been quite a lot of progress in this area.
There are a bunch of costs besides the labor - you'd have to acquire the land, which is going to be extremely expensive because it's by definition on the waterfront. Then you'd need a bunch of capital equipment, engineering services, environmental studies, etc, etc. You'd also have to figure out what to do with the dirt you dug up, which is a harder problem than it sounds like - it costs money to move it somewhere, and you can't (generally) just dump it at sea.
While I'm a hundred percent in favor of having the government just put people to work on useful projects like this, this particular one really isn't cheap.
... I bought one of these, and based on watching my loads over time, 2 kilowatts is no big deal at all. My dryer uses way more power than that. In fact, an electric toaster uses over a kilowatt. So not only could you charge an electric SUV, you could charge an electric freaking train and still have enough capacity to spare.