No, you're wrong. I put five children through university, and for cash, no loans. And I'd be happy to walk. I have the skills and the sense of responsibility to cover myself, my family, and my employer.
Thus demonstrating that financial security is similar to a lack of responsibility in that they make the costs of moral choices easier to bear.
Liberty comes at a price.
And the second that price is that your family goes hungry, you will find this choice not so easy.
I mean, good for you and all for earning and managing your money, and having integrity. That doesn't mean it's a moral failing of anyone who can't afford to make the same choices, or that the correct choice is obvious for every person and every situation.
At some intersections, the difference between going through a yellow and waiting for the next green is over 90 seconds.
Ha! I laugh. The light at the highway overpass right by my old apartment, the only reasonable way for me to get anywhere, I clocked at four minutes from red to green. On the plus side it was only a ten minute commute to work minus the light, but at a roughly 50% penalty for missing it you better believe I tried to make it through the yellow. Funnily enough I think the traffic engineers compensated for this by making the time between red on one direction and green on another longer.
Traffic cameras aren't all that bad, though. There are intersections where there are safety hazards from people running red lights all the time, and the best solution is a deterrent. On the other hand, there are other intersections where the best solution is to adjust the light. That's what I like about how Austin did it. They had a bunch of problem intersections, and they decided on a case-by-case basis what to do about them. At quite a few they decided not to install cameras but instead lengthened the yellow light or otherwise changed the cycles which worked quite well. They put up some cameras too, but hey some of those intersections were bad and I'd seen people not just cutting the yellow light too close but steaming outright through a solid red.
I don't like cameras, fundamentally, for a bunch of slippery-slope foot-in-the-door types of reasons. I don't like the line about them only firing when someone runs the light. That's just the usual "We promise not to abuse our powers and we're honest which is why we don't need oversight" bullshit. And I don't like that the implementation flat out sucks in a lot of places. They'll send out the tickets automatically based on plate OCR and not even look at the actual picture to even try to glean what really happened from that limited source of information. Like someone getting a ticked because their car was being towed and the tow truck ran a light. Or towns that try to up revenue by shortening yellow lights below safe limits, creating the dangerous situation that the cameras are allegedly supposed to deter. Except if they truly worked as deterrents, then there would be no ticket revenue. And forget any anti-authoritarian paranoia -- it's a very bad idea when your chosen "solution" to a problem gives you a financial incentive to not solve the problem.
So traffic cameras are here, and I don't find them all that bad. But if the people of Mississippi decide they don't want them around, especially if the implementation sucked and people thought they were getting screwed over, then I can understand that and more power to them.
No, actually, the cooling element is made cool by evaporating a refrigerant.
Oh right, duh. I would have noticed my error if I'd made the point that condensing water out of the air can't be what causes the cooling since that releases heat, and evaporation absorbs it.:P
If you want a "Mr. Fusion" device, it is likely to be more along the lines of an Internal Electrostatic Confinement (IEC... aka the "Farnsworth-Hurch Fusor") or the Polywell approaches.
I personally am rooting for Z-Pinch devices that seem to show a lot of promise. I eagerly await the result of their scaled-up tests. Though I'll admit this is largely because their Z Machine nuclear research device looked like this during operation. Even though the new device looks nothing like that. Awesome of that magnitude should be rewarded!
Unless, of course, the rabbit is the necessary catalyst.
Doubtful! I have an experimental setup which produces a net positive of rabbits. I've found that putting the rabbits in a deuterium tank completely kills the reaction (and the reactants). Maybe the opposite is true as well, and rabbits prevent deuterium fusion.
Since we're getting into semantics, an AC unit actually removes moisture from the air. That's why it is called a Air Conditioner, not an Air Cooler. The cooling effect is just a byproduct of the moisture removal.
Exactly opposite. An air conditioner cools the air by passing that air over the cooling element, which is made cool by compressing a refrigerant. It is the refrigerant undergoing phase changes within the sealed coils that causes the cooling.
The removal of water from the air (condensation) is a byproduct of the cooling.
OK, but it would have to be hot relative to the surroundings in order to gain any worthwhile energy.
It's the "surroundings", or rather the conditions whereby fusion is initiated, that are why it's called "Cold". Every other form of fusion we know about requires tremendous heat and pressure throughout before fusion begins. Like a magnetically contained plasma heated to 100 million C, or a mass much greater than that of Jupiter, before fusion will even start.
From what I understand, even the faux experiment didn't succeed in boiling water. If you don't boil water, I'd guess that it's not hot enough. I can only guess that the assumption was that if this experiment was truly a success, that it could be scaled up dramatically.
The very idea that you could ever get a net-positive amount of energy out of it, regardless of size, is the real assumption. So far that hasn't come close to happening, so, yeah... Even if it is "cold fusion", i'm not holding my breath on it becoming a power source. Maybe a high-energy neutron source, which is still useful (even if it isn't fusion that creates the neutrons).
Can somebody explain all the discussion and discrepancies here? After all, that kind of effect does not seem to require too much effort to reproduce, compared with hot fusion or particle physics. So -- is there some disagreement about whether the effect is there and measurable or is the disagreement just about how to explain the effect? Is there some agreement on what the energy source *could* be? Obviously if there is an effect but you reject the hypothesis that cold fusion is the cause, something else must cause the effect -- and some material must chemically react or similar.
My understanding is that after spending some time on further research, many can reproduce the results of the original Pons-Fleischman experiment. The problem was that in the original experiment there were variables the two didn't know about and thus didn't document but turned out to be important enough that others couldn't reproduce their work. And since they'd gone straight to the press declaring success before allowing others to run the experiment and thus figure this out, it made them look like charlatans, and held back the research that eventually perfected the experimental procedure for years such that few know it actually eventually worked.
I think mostly these days, and including this new experiment, it's the cause that is most disagreed upon, and most people do not think it is a fusion reaction. This particular experiment doesn't seem to have had much outside verification, but because they're doing it the proper way publishing in peer-reviewed journals and seem to have a good grasp on the experiment, they're being given much more benefit of the doubt. At least for the experiment itself, not the cold fusion hypothesis they put forward to explain it.
I think the original claim got a lot of fury from people who not only dismissed the research, but the way they announced it via press conference. In this case, the researchers are doing the right things - publishing first in peer reviewed journals, making presentations at the major conferences, getting the results validated by other experts.
Well yeah, of course they got a lot of well-earned ire for going around standard scientific channels, and a lot of well-earned derision when nobody else was able to reproduce their results. Ironically enough this was largely a case of cause and effect -- by skipping the peer-review and reproduction of experiments that usually precede such dramatic announcements, they skipped the step whereby the unknown factors in their experiment that prevented others from being able to reproduce the results from being discovered. So instead of "Hey we have this neat experiment, try to reproduce it" followed by "we couldn't, hey maybe there's a variable not accounted for", we got "Look world! Cold fusion!" followed by "We couldn't reproduce it, you're full of shit!"
My understanding is that these days people are regularly getting excess (as in more than expected, not net-positive) energy from the same experiment. It may not be fusion, but it's interesting, and would have a completely different image if not for the buffoonery of the experimenters.
So you're absolutely right, these guys are doing it the right way. Even if Krivit is right and the cold fusion hypothesis is just "physics fantasies", they're still doing "excellent empirical work" and that should be the key to figuring out what is going on.
That's fine, fact is that size has little to do with off-road capability. There have been off-road vehicles for both the individual and the family who have an actual need for such since forever. 90% of the SUV market has nothing to do with them, and their bloated size has nothing to do with being useful off-road, since most of em aren't.
There are fairly small Jeeps which you can buy straight from the dealer that do exactly what the GP was talking about. So it's not like some hypothetical or rare and exotic thing.
Okay the USA isn't mostly city, like people who never leave LA and NYC tend to think.
USA is mostly open country, and large portions are well outside "city limits". Even here in Nor Cal, we are surrounded by mountains and such.
LOL, yeah, cus stuck in Texas I had no idea that the US was mostly open country. Hey when crossing that open country I think having a fuel efficient vehicle is even more important, but what do I know? I only drive my subcompact across the country, through the mountains, and through the snow.
SUVs are nothing but enclosed 4x4 trucks. They are big, heavy and get through all sorts of mud, snow and streams that I wouldn't dare take a subcompact even near.
So quit harping on SUVs, they aren't the problem.
Pfft. They used to be, but these days most of them are based on car chassis not truck chassis. Subcompacts are fine with most snow on roads. If you're driving through mud and streams all the time, or literally live in the mountains away from the highways where a steep snowy road can be dangerous without 4wd, then more power to you. Don't for a second pretend that this is the typical usage of SUVs. You're talking about people who actually require a certain class of vehicle, I'm talking about all the work-and-grocery-store commuters in sub-20mpg "trucks" that have never been off road or been used for an honest day's work and never will be. Guess who is talking about the common case? So yeah I will keep harping on SUVs for as long as I'm surrounded by far more than could possibly be needed.
The problem is that not everyone fits in a Mini Cooper or even a midsize car. And if SUVs didn't exist, you'd be harping on people driving Crown Vics.
You don't hear me harping on dump trucks, bulldozers, and semis do you? No. Unless 90% of them were used when absolutely not necessary, and then you would. Get it?
"SUVs" existed for the people who needed them long before the term "SUV" existed, and they still will when the SUV problem -- and it sure as hell is a problem -- goes away.
Not even Americans who choose to rely on public transit? We exist, I assure you.
Lucky you that you can, and good for you that you do. Point your finger at your neighbor in the Century Buick, or the Escalade, and convince them to change their ways before pointing your finger halfway around the world at a developing country making a cheap and really quite efficient vehicle. Because otherwise you still sound like a hypocrite.
Just because it is the path that America went down doesn't mean that it is the best path for other nations to follow.
Yes, and if India decides that they should follow a different path, then more power to them.
I think that the argument against giving them gas-powered cars is valid.
We aren't giving them anything, and thus it is not our choice to not give them. We are not the Greek gods, and Tata Motors is not Prometheus, okay?
It's the whole attitude here that pisses me off. I'd have no problem if people were saying "Hey India, look at what heavy adoption of cars at the expense of public transportation did to our country. You might want to think before making the same mistake we did." Instead, all I hear is this air of superior judgement, all "India shouldn't be given cars because they're going to fuck up the environment". It's the combination of the hypocrisy of ignoring or downplaying our own effect as polluter, with the sense of superiority where of course nobody can tell us what to do but we can decide whether India should be allowed to have cars that just reeks of hypocrisy and arrogance.
India already has the gift of fire-in-a-cylinder-with-a-piston. That djinni has been out of the bottle for a long time. And I don't see much to complain about with this particular incarnation. Compared to the fuel economy and emissions of the top gas and hybrid cars, it's competitive on fuel economy and emissions. Compared to the average car in the North American fleet, it's very good. Compared to the two-stroke engines running scooters and auto-rickshaws in the cities of India already, and which the Nano is priced to compete against, it is insanely great on emissions.
I think that India would be a perfect market for electric cars. I think that India would be a perfect market for electric cars. Electric cars are not big in America because the average American's commute exceeds the range and speed requirements for the average electric car currently in production.
Except an electric with enough juice for even a short commute is going to cost a hell of a lot more than the Nano. Yes, ICEs are not the ideal solution going forward. In the meantime, electrics serve some few needs, and hopefully will serve more in the future. In the meantime, if they want to improve their standard of living in a way that will be both affordable and get them halfway across the city and back or to the next town and back, and which will actually reduce emissions when it replaces the currently highly emissive vehicles that clog New Delhi, then who are you or I to say no? It's not like we're setting a better example, now are we? There's nothing wrong with discussing the issues, there is something wrong with riding a high horse while doing so.
Which country would that be? Germany with BMW, Mercedes and Audi? Or rather a scandinacian one? Volvo comes to mind. And what about all the Japanese SUVs?
Meanwhile, my 99 Century Buick V6 needs less gas than a Mitsubishi Galant V6 from approximately the same year.
So what the hell is your point?
Yeah, and where are all the SUVs from those foreign car companies sold? You don't think Toyota started making SUVs to take advantage of the lucrative large-truck-in-Tokyo market, do you?
Oh sure they do sell in other markets, but the point is that nobody has latched onto the gas-guzzling needlessly-oversized truck and SUV like in America. And therefore nobody from there, including those driving Century Buicks, should be pointing fingers at Indians buying the cheapest car ever and saying "Hey you shouldn't do that!"
AMD didn't have a choice, spinning off their fabs in order to secure billions of USD from ATIC was the only way they were going to stay afloat.
You make good point. I will only add that AMD could operate for quite some time at the current burn rate, but that this leaves them only able to compete with Intel at all for a couple years without finding a way to finance new fabs and spinning of the fabs was an excellent way to do this. With the credit crisis that occurred not long after they sealed the deal, this seems doubly wise. Yet on other hand, losing the ability to make x86 chips would also doom their ability to compete at all and they'd last for as long as they could prevent a legal injunction. So unless they have a decent legal argument and can hash out a deal with Intel, it's going to hurt either way.
First off, evolution isn't magic. The scenario you're describing assumes that some mosquitos could survive this weapon today. If we get away from the "one breeding season" assumption and allow a longer timeframe, it still assumes that a solution is within the range of biological adaptation, which is not a sure thing.
You're killing me here. You're telling me that my plan to breed puppies that are nigh invulnerable, incredibly strong, or have the ability to teleport by placing litter after litter of them inside small air tight boxes that are then crushed by hydraulic presses isn't going to work? But I've already been through so many trial generations! It would be such a waste (of puppies) to give up now.
Strictly speaking, Intel's argument is pointless. Yes, their deal is with AMD. But AMD's foundry only manufactures the chips, it does not design them. (Unless I somehow misunderstood their fabless plan.) Since the fab creates the chips on behalf of AMD, the licensing is not violated.
It may not be that easy. The Intel/AMD license agreement, for all its notoriety, is completely confidential and thus nobody knows exactly what is in it except for a small number of people at both companies. Despite that, it has long been suspected that part of the agreement is that AMD would not manufacture more than a certain % of its chips at a 3rd party fab, which FoundryCo -- wait, it's GlobalFoundries now, slightly less stupid name -- would almost certainly count as once fully spun off.
Strictly speaking, though, nobody outside the upper echelons knows. The only thing I'm 100% certain of is that AMD thought about the cross-licensing agreement when they came up with the idea for spinning off the fabs, and would not have done it if they thought it would cost them their license. But of course companies can differ in their self-serving legal reasoning, and who knows maybe they knew they were taking a chance and felt that the global anti-trust inquiries and the threat of losing AMD64 licensing would keep Intel playing ball?
1) If a customer doesn't know how much load playing a DVD is, they don't care about advertised battery life.
O_o Seriously?
You think knowing the % CPU utilization of watching a DVD (or BluRay, if this makes you feel better) is a pre-requisite to caring about the question "Will my laptop be able to play a full DVD between recharges?"
And I suppose anyone who doesn't know engine timings and torque curves wouldn't care about the question "Can I get to Grandma's house without refueling" too. That's weird, because I care about MPG but know very little about the engine physics that inform it. Should they scrap the "city/highway" MPG usage models, and instead tell you what MPG you'd get with the accelerator floored the entire way?
You're being ridiculous. Obviously people will care about being able to do the things they want to do without knowing exactly how much load on the system that actually entails.
Of course, even if I accept this premise, you're still not giving them the information they want. Okay, so I know that the fully loaded laptop life time is 40 minutes, and I know that my DVD player uses 5% of my processor. Now what? What's the scaling factor so I can do the math? Oh right it's not that easy, even if you're an electrical engineer. I know what it is you said I should know, and you still can't answer the question I care about.
2) Minimum is a more useful number because it always applies. Typical usage figures can be plucked out of thin air because it varies too much.
Easy to figure out is not the same as useful. Minimum is rarely useful because it rarely applies to what the person is actually doing. When the "typical" numbers can be 6x higher than "minimum", and what people really care about is "typical" for all the difficulty of defining what that means, then no minimum isn't that useful.
Sure the minimum should be specified. That does not get you out of the tricky problem of estimating 'typical' battery life, because that is what the customer wants to know, and for good reason. If you refuse to give them anything more useful than minimum, then you lose sales because you can't or won't answer the questions they care about.
Incorrect. I would respond, "That is the minimum time under the heaviest possible load it can be put under."
And they'd say "Okay, is playing a DVD the heaviest possible load, so I couldn't even play half of one movie? Or will I be able to play my movie? What about working on my earnings report?" and then you either have to refuse to give them any other number and lose the sale, or start talking about "typical" usage.
I'd like to kindly point you to my initial post where I quite clearly said "fully load" and not "typical load"..
Yes, I noticed, and I'd like to point you to my post where I clearly understood what you are talking about and said "That isn't very useful to the customer". Just because the minimum battery life has the useful property of being easier to quantify without hand-waving and assumptions doesn't mean it's actually the more useful number. Customers want to know if their lap top will last on a cross-country flight doing what it is they usually do.
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No, you're wrong. I put five children through university, and for cash, no loans. And I'd be happy to walk. I have the skills and the sense of responsibility to cover myself, my family, and my employer.
Thus demonstrating that financial security is similar to a lack of responsibility in that they make the costs of moral choices easier to bear.
Liberty comes at a price.
And the second that price is that your family goes hungry, you will find this choice not so easy.
I mean, good for you and all for earning and managing your money, and having integrity. That doesn't mean it's a moral failing of anyone who can't afford to make the same choices, or that the correct choice is obvious for every person and every situation.
At some intersections, the difference between going through a yellow and waiting for the next green is over 90 seconds.
Ha! I laugh. The light at the highway overpass right by my old apartment, the only reasonable way for me to get anywhere, I clocked at four minutes from red to green. On the plus side it was only a ten minute commute to work minus the light, but at a roughly 50% penalty for missing it you better believe I tried to make it through the yellow. Funnily enough I think the traffic engineers compensated for this by making the time between red on one direction and green on another longer.
Traffic cameras aren't all that bad, though. There are intersections where there are safety hazards from people running red lights all the time, and the best solution is a deterrent. On the other hand, there are other intersections where the best solution is to adjust the light. That's what I like about how Austin did it. They had a bunch of problem intersections, and they decided on a case-by-case basis what to do about them. At quite a few they decided not to install cameras but instead lengthened the yellow light or otherwise changed the cycles which worked quite well. They put up some cameras too, but hey some of those intersections were bad and I'd seen people not just cutting the yellow light too close but steaming outright through a solid red.
I don't like cameras, fundamentally, for a bunch of slippery-slope foot-in-the-door types of reasons. I don't like the line about them only firing when someone runs the light. That's just the usual "We promise not to abuse our powers and we're honest which is why we don't need oversight" bullshit. And I don't like that the implementation flat out sucks in a lot of places. They'll send out the tickets automatically based on plate OCR and not even look at the actual picture to even try to glean what really happened from that limited source of information. Like someone getting a ticked because their car was being towed and the tow truck ran a light. Or towns that try to up revenue by shortening yellow lights below safe limits, creating the dangerous situation that the cameras are allegedly supposed to deter. Except if they truly worked as deterrents, then there would be no ticket revenue. And forget any anti-authoritarian paranoia -- it's a very bad idea when your chosen "solution" to a problem gives you a financial incentive to not solve the problem.
So traffic cameras are here, and I don't find them all that bad. But if the people of Mississippi decide they don't want them around, especially if the implementation sucked and people thought they were getting screwed over, then I can understand that and more power to them.
I like engine girl. :)
No, actually, the cooling element is made cool by evaporating a refrigerant.
Oh right, duh. I would have noticed my error if I'd made the point that condensing water out of the air can't be what causes the cooling since that releases heat, and evaporation absorbs it. :P
If you want a "Mr. Fusion" device, it is likely to be more along the lines of an Internal Electrostatic Confinement (IEC... aka the "Farnsworth-Hurch Fusor") or the Polywell approaches.
I personally am rooting for Z-Pinch devices that seem to show a lot of promise. I eagerly await the result of their scaled-up tests. Though I'll admit this is largely because their Z Machine nuclear research device looked like this during operation. Even though the new device looks nothing like that. Awesome of that magnitude should be rewarded!
Unless, of course, the rabbit is the necessary catalyst.
Doubtful! I have an experimental setup which produces a net positive of rabbits. I've found that putting the rabbits in a deuterium tank completely kills the reaction (and the reactants). Maybe the opposite is true as well, and rabbits prevent deuterium fusion.
Since we're getting into semantics, an AC unit actually removes moisture from the air. That's why it is called a Air Conditioner, not an Air Cooler. The cooling effect is just a byproduct of the moisture removal.
Exactly opposite. An air conditioner cools the air by passing that air over the cooling element, which is made cool by compressing a refrigerant. It is the refrigerant undergoing phase changes within the sealed coils that causes the cooling.
The removal of water from the air (condensation) is a byproduct of the cooling.
Which was the inspiration for my discipline-crossing Zombie Slacker!
OK, but it would have to be hot relative to the surroundings in order to gain any worthwhile energy.
It's the "surroundings", or rather the conditions whereby fusion is initiated, that are why it's called "Cold". Every other form of fusion we know about requires tremendous heat and pressure throughout before fusion begins. Like a magnetically contained plasma heated to 100 million C, or a mass much greater than that of Jupiter, before fusion will even start.
From what I understand, even the faux experiment didn't succeed in boiling water. If you don't boil water, I'd guess that it's not hot enough. I can only guess that the assumption was that if this experiment was truly a success, that it could be scaled up dramatically.
The very idea that you could ever get a net-positive amount of energy out of it, regardless of size, is the real assumption. So far that hasn't come close to happening, so, yeah... Even if it is "cold fusion", i'm not holding my breath on it becoming a power source. Maybe a high-energy neutron source, which is still useful (even if it isn't fusion that creates the neutrons).
Can somebody explain all the discussion and discrepancies here? After all, that kind of effect does not seem to require too much effort to reproduce, compared with hot fusion or particle physics.
So -- is there some disagreement about whether the effect is there and measurable or is the disagreement just about how to explain the effect? Is there some agreement on what the energy source *could* be? Obviously if there is an effect but you reject the hypothesis that cold fusion is the cause, something else must cause the effect -- and some material must chemically react or similar.
My understanding is that after spending some time on further research, many can reproduce the results of the original Pons-Fleischman experiment. The problem was that in the original experiment there were variables the two didn't know about and thus didn't document but turned out to be important enough that others couldn't reproduce their work. And since they'd gone straight to the press declaring success before allowing others to run the experiment and thus figure this out, it made them look like charlatans, and held back the research that eventually perfected the experimental procedure for years such that few know it actually eventually worked.
I think mostly these days, and including this new experiment, it's the cause that is most disagreed upon, and most people do not think it is a fusion reaction. This particular experiment doesn't seem to have had much outside verification, but because they're doing it the proper way publishing in peer-reviewed journals and seem to have a good grasp on the experiment, they're being given much more benefit of the doubt. At least for the experiment itself, not the cold fusion hypothesis they put forward to explain it.
I'll be sure to tell Gibbs and Carnot to stand down and surrender their physical effects...
They're safe since neither are common names in early 21st century North American demographics.
Oh, you didn't know that was the standard? Yeah, it was proven sometime in the 1980s.
I think the original claim got a lot of fury from people who not only dismissed the research, but the way they announced it via press conference. In this case, the researchers are doing the right things - publishing first in peer reviewed journals, making presentations at the major conferences, getting the results validated by other experts.
Well yeah, of course they got a lot of well-earned ire for going around standard scientific channels, and a lot of well-earned derision when nobody else was able to reproduce their results. Ironically enough this was largely a case of cause and effect -- by skipping the peer-review and reproduction of experiments that usually precede such dramatic announcements, they skipped the step whereby the unknown factors in their experiment that prevented others from being able to reproduce the results from being discovered. So instead of "Hey we have this neat experiment, try to reproduce it" followed by "we couldn't, hey maybe there's a variable not accounted for", we got "Look world! Cold fusion!" followed by "We couldn't reproduce it, you're full of shit!"
My understanding is that these days people are regularly getting excess (as in more than expected, not net-positive) energy from the same experiment. It may not be fusion, but it's interesting, and would have a completely different image if not for the buffoonery of the experimenters.
So you're absolutely right, these guys are doing it the right way. Even if Krivit is right and the cold fusion hypothesis is just "physics fantasies", they're still doing "excellent empirical work" and that should be the key to figuring out what is going on.
That's fine, fact is that size has little to do with off-road capability. There have been off-road vehicles for both the individual and the family who have an actual need for such since forever. 90% of the SUV market has nothing to do with them, and their bloated size has nothing to do with being useful off-road, since most of em aren't.
There are fairly small Jeeps which you can buy straight from the dealer that do exactly what the GP was talking about. So it's not like some hypothetical or rare and exotic thing.
Okay the USA isn't mostly city, like people who never leave LA and NYC tend to think.
USA is mostly open country, and large portions are well outside "city limits". Even here in Nor Cal, we are surrounded by mountains and such.
LOL, yeah, cus stuck in Texas I had no idea that the US was mostly open country. Hey when crossing that open country I think having a fuel efficient vehicle is even more important, but what do I know? I only drive my subcompact across the country, through the mountains, and through the snow.
SUVs are nothing but enclosed 4x4 trucks. They are big, heavy and get through all sorts of mud, snow and streams that I wouldn't dare take a subcompact even near.
So quit harping on SUVs, they aren't the problem.
Pfft. They used to be, but these days most of them are based on car chassis not truck chassis. Subcompacts are fine with most snow on roads. If you're driving through mud and streams all the time, or literally live in the mountains away from the highways where a steep snowy road can be dangerous without 4wd, then more power to you. Don't for a second pretend that this is the typical usage of SUVs. You're talking about people who actually require a certain class of vehicle, I'm talking about all the work-and-grocery-store commuters in sub-20mpg "trucks" that have never been off road or been used for an honest day's work and never will be. Guess who is talking about the common case? So yeah I will keep harping on SUVs for as long as I'm surrounded by far more than could possibly be needed.
The problem is that not everyone fits in a Mini Cooper or even a midsize car. And if SUVs didn't exist, you'd be harping on people driving Crown Vics.
You don't hear me harping on dump trucks, bulldozers, and semis do you? No. Unless 90% of them were used when absolutely not necessary, and then you would. Get it?
"SUVs" existed for the people who needed them long before the term "SUV" existed, and they still will when the SUV problem -- and it sure as hell is a problem -- goes away.
Not even Americans who choose to rely on public transit? We exist, I assure you.
Lucky you that you can, and good for you that you do. Point your finger at your neighbor in the Century Buick, or the Escalade, and convince them to change their ways before pointing your finger halfway around the world at a developing country making a cheap and really quite efficient vehicle. Because otherwise you still sound like a hypocrite.
Just because it is the path that America went down doesn't mean that it is the best path for other nations to follow.
Yes, and if India decides that they should follow a different path, then more power to them.
I think that the argument against giving them gas-powered cars is valid.
We aren't giving them anything, and thus it is not our choice to not give them. We are not the Greek gods, and Tata Motors is not Prometheus, okay?
It's the whole attitude here that pisses me off. I'd have no problem if people were saying "Hey India, look at what heavy adoption of cars at the expense of public transportation did to our country. You might want to think before making the same mistake we did." Instead, all I hear is this air of superior judgement, all "India shouldn't be given cars because they're going to fuck up the environment". It's the combination of the hypocrisy of ignoring or downplaying our own effect as polluter, with the sense of superiority where of course nobody can tell us what to do but we can decide whether India should be allowed to have cars that just reeks of hypocrisy and arrogance.
India already has the gift of fire-in-a-cylinder-with-a-piston. That djinni has been out of the bottle for a long time. And I don't see much to complain about with this particular incarnation. Compared to the fuel economy and emissions of the top gas and hybrid cars, it's competitive on fuel economy and emissions. Compared to the average car in the North American fleet, it's very good. Compared to the two-stroke engines running scooters and auto-rickshaws in the cities of India already, and which the Nano is priced to compete against, it is insanely great on emissions.
I think that India would be a perfect market for electric cars. I think that India would be a perfect market for electric cars. Electric cars are not big in America because the average American's commute exceeds the range and speed requirements for the average electric car currently in production.
Except an electric with enough juice for even a short commute is going to cost a hell of a lot more than the Nano. Yes, ICEs are not the ideal solution going forward. In the meantime, electrics serve some few needs, and hopefully will serve more in the future. In the meantime, if they want to improve their standard of living in a way that will be both affordable and get them halfway across the city and back or to the next town and back, and which will actually reduce emissions when it replaces the currently highly emissive vehicles that clog New Delhi, then who are you or I to say no? It's not like we're setting a better example, now are we? There's nothing wrong with discussing the issues, there is something wrong with riding a high horse while doing so.
Which country would that be? Germany with BMW, Mercedes and Audi? Or rather a scandinacian one? Volvo comes to mind. And what about all the Japanese SUVs?
Meanwhile, my 99 Century Buick V6 needs less gas than a Mitsubishi Galant V6 from approximately the same year.
So what the hell is your point?
Yeah, and where are all the SUVs from those foreign car companies sold? You don't think Toyota started making SUVs to take advantage of the lucrative large-truck-in-Tokyo market, do you?
Oh sure they do sell in other markets, but the point is that nobody has latched onto the gas-guzzling needlessly-oversized truck and SUV like in America. And therefore nobody from there, including those driving Century Buicks, should be pointing fingers at Indians buying the cheapest car ever and saying "Hey you shouldn't do that!"
AMD didn't have a choice, spinning off their fabs in order to secure billions of USD from ATIC was the only way they were going to stay afloat.
You make good point. I will only add that AMD could operate for quite some time at the current burn rate, but that this leaves them only able to compete with Intel at all for a couple years without finding a way to finance new fabs and spinning of the fabs was an excellent way to do this. With the credit crisis that occurred not long after they sealed the deal, this seems doubly wise. Yet on other hand, losing the ability to make x86 chips would also doom their ability to compete at all and they'd last for as long as they could prevent a legal injunction. So unless they have a decent legal argument and can hash out a deal with Intel, it's going to hurt either way.
First off, evolution isn't magic. The scenario you're describing assumes that some mosquitos could survive this weapon today. If we get away from the "one breeding season" assumption and allow a longer timeframe, it still assumes that a solution is within the range of biological adaptation, which is not a sure thing.
You're killing me here. You're telling me that my plan to breed puppies that are nigh invulnerable, incredibly strong, or have the ability to teleport by placing litter after litter of them inside small air tight boxes that are then crushed by hydraulic presses isn't going to work? But I've already been through so many trial generations! It would be such a waste (of puppies) to give up now.
One-off business app != legacy.
Legacy != performance is irrelevant.
Strictly speaking, Intel's argument is pointless. Yes, their deal is with AMD. But AMD's foundry only manufactures the chips, it does not design them. (Unless I somehow misunderstood their fabless plan.) Since the fab creates the chips on behalf of AMD, the licensing is not violated.
It may not be that easy. The Intel/AMD license agreement, for all its notoriety, is completely confidential and thus nobody knows exactly what is in it except for a small number of people at both companies. Despite that, it has long been suspected that part of the agreement is that AMD would not manufacture more than a certain % of its chips at a 3rd party fab, which FoundryCo -- wait, it's GlobalFoundries now, slightly less stupid name -- would almost certainly count as once fully spun off.
Strictly speaking, though, nobody outside the upper echelons knows. The only thing I'm 100% certain of is that AMD thought about the cross-licensing agreement when they came up with the idea for spinning off the fabs, and would not have done it if they thought it would cost them their license. But of course companies can differ in their self-serving legal reasoning, and who knows maybe they knew they were taking a chance and felt that the global anti-trust inquiries and the threat of losing AMD64 licensing would keep Intel playing ball?
Hell, screw that, give me a laser system to kill carpenter bees and you have yourself a sale.
s/carpenter bees/door-to-door (salesmen|evangelists)/;
or more immediately practical
s/carpenter bees/the SWAT team about to kick in my door/;
1) If a customer doesn't know how much load playing a DVD is, they don't care about advertised battery life.
O_o Seriously?
You think knowing the % CPU utilization of watching a DVD (or BluRay, if this makes you feel better) is a pre-requisite to caring about the question "Will my laptop be able to play a full DVD between recharges?"
And I suppose anyone who doesn't know engine timings and torque curves wouldn't care about the question "Can I get to Grandma's house without refueling" too. That's weird, because I care about MPG but know very little about the engine physics that inform it. Should they scrap the "city/highway" MPG usage models, and instead tell you what MPG you'd get with the accelerator floored the entire way?
You're being ridiculous. Obviously people will care about being able to do the things they want to do without knowing exactly how much load on the system that actually entails.
Of course, even if I accept this premise, you're still not giving them the information they want. Okay, so I know that the fully loaded laptop life time is 40 minutes, and I know that my DVD player uses 5% of my processor. Now what? What's the scaling factor so I can do the math? Oh right it's not that easy, even if you're an electrical engineer. I know what it is you said I should know, and you still can't answer the question I care about.
2) Minimum is a more useful number because it always applies. Typical usage figures can be plucked out of thin air because it varies too much.
Easy to figure out is not the same as useful. Minimum is rarely useful because it rarely applies to what the person is actually doing. When the "typical" numbers can be 6x higher than "minimum", and what people really care about is "typical" for all the difficulty of defining what that means, then no minimum isn't that useful.
Sure the minimum should be specified. That does not get you out of the tricky problem of estimating 'typical' battery life, because that is what the customer wants to know, and for good reason. If you refuse to give them anything more useful than minimum, then you lose sales because you can't or won't answer the questions they care about.
Incorrect. I would respond, "That is the minimum time under the heaviest possible load it can be put under."
And they'd say "Okay, is playing a DVD the heaviest possible load, so I couldn't even play half of one movie? Or will I be able to play my movie? What about working on my earnings report?" and then you either have to refuse to give them any other number and lose the sale, or start talking about "typical" usage.
I'd like to kindly point you to my initial post where I quite clearly said "fully load" and not "typical load"..
Yes, I noticed, and I'd like to point you to my post where I clearly understood what you are talking about and said "That isn't very useful to the customer". Just because the minimum battery life has the useful property of being easier to quantify without hand-waving and assumptions doesn't mean it's actually the more useful number. Customers want to know if their lap top will last on a cross-country flight doing what it is they usually do.