I drive a prius, I am disappointed with the fact that they STILL use outdated nimh batteries instead of lithium. Afaik they also don't use any of these new awesome ultracapacitors, so what the hell are they doing?
Why do you care what battery type they use? You should be happy that battery replacement is not an issue because NiMH are well developed and understood.
Ultracapacitors have no place in hybrid cars. They are low voltage just like battery cells, so you have to connect a lot of them in series to reach 150V or higher. They are low capacity compared to chemical cells, so they don't compete on cost. Some people think using both is good, but now you've go more components overall and then there's the issue that just connecting them in parallel with a battery doesn't actually do anything for you.
An ultra-cap only solution could be nice if they had even higher capacity than today.
Hybrids CAN pay for themselves on a couple conditions. #1 you must use the vehicle for 100K miles or more. #2 you must be able to do math #3 you probably need to be doing a lot of city driving.
Let's do some math for the 2012 Ford Fusion
Over 100K miles at 26mpg you will burn 3846 gallons of gas.
At $3.50 per gallon that's $13461 in gas.
For the hybrid, it's 39mpg (combined as is the 26 figure above). so this works out to $8974 in gas.
For a savings of $4487.
If I recall correctly, the price adder for that car was higher than that, so not a win. However, the savings goes up by 50 percent if you drive it for 150K miles. The savings will also go up with gas prices. It also gets better if you do predominantly city driving (I used the generic "combined" EPA figures). At some point it will be a net savings. This trivial example also neglects some other nice things like not wearing out your brake rotors (a non-trivial cost) or reduced number of oil changes (a trivial cost). It also neglects the cost of battery replacement - something which people worry about but I have not heard being a real world issue.
A Prius OTOH can be had for much closer to $20K and is generally a winner compared to any non-hybrid car so long as you drive 100K miles. I'm not a fan of it and would not buy one.
As volumes go up we can also expect the cost differential to come down.
So there we have the reason - it's not obvious weather you save dollars. Many people actually DO save money with a hybrid - particularly Prius owners.
I've often considered the issue of negotiating price of an item. One thing that seems fair is to take the average of the sellers lowest acceptable price and the buyers maximum price. Even if they could agree that this is "fair", getting them both to play without lying seems a near impossibility.
It's an open question in physics weather antimatter will fall toward earth or move away from it due to gravity. Is there any chance this scale could weigh an atom of anti-hydrogen?
If you have one solar cell and want to install it at a particular latitude, there is a specific orientation that will produce the most energy over a day. All cells should be in that orientation to maximize their individual energy production. This is what leads to fixed installations being large flat arrays with every cell in the same orientation. If you have 100 cells it is true that you can put 50 of them facing more to the easy and 50 more to the west, and you may be able to do this with less land area than all 100 laid out facing south. It will also be true that it produces LESS energy than the large flat array of 100. We can also add a tracker to the flat array and gather more total energy than EITHER fixed structure through the day.
By far, the cost of the cells is more than any other component, so each one needs to produce the maximum energy and that leads to all of them being in the same orientation. A sun tracker can be cheaper than adding additional cells, so that's a good way to increase output. Building upward is an obvious way to get more cells per land area, but this is both obvious and silly. This is the second time I've seen an article talking about power per land area instead of power per cell area (actual cell efficiency) or watts per dollar.
Beyond that, the control/inverter is another big cost. Each cell has an optimal Voltage/Current operating point given the angle and intensity of light falling on it. As soon as you put 2 strings of cells in different orientations, they need to operate at different voltages or currents for optimal conversion efficiency which will require multiple inverters rather than just a bigger capacity one. This is a second way these non-optimal systems cost more.
The problem with 720 is that they don't seem to be making 720 panels any more. It's always 1366x768. This requires that the source video be stretched by 16/15 which is impossible to do without blurring everything a little. Normally scaling 720 to 1080 is a 1.5x which is reasonable to do. Also scaling 1080 down to 720 is easy to do while keeping a good picture. Scaling either of these native resolutions to 768 causes problems.
IMHO this is an industry wide effort to make 720 TVs look worse than 1080 even when viewing 720p video. There really is no other explanation. I've heard claims about standard size glass which is all made for the 1080 world, but that doesn't hold up. I'd prefer a 30" 720 to a 32" 768 - just throw away the extra glass - or just give me "native" mode and put a black border around the extra 48 pixels (24 top, 24 bottom). Anything is better than converting 720 to 768.
And if you use the left hand at 1:00 or 2:00 position it will break your arm in multiple places and then use the pieces to smash your face. Same for right hand at 11:00.
I went in for a haircut recently. first question out of this clerk's mouth was 'your email address?'.
in total surprise, I delayed and then said 'uhm, no; just here for a haircut, please'.
The place I get mine cut uses phone number. They record notes about how you wanted your hair cut so they don't have to ask a lot of question next time. For this purpose it would be nice to have a fake phone number that you can always use.
One time the girl asked for my phone number and I replied something like "Can I get yours too?" with a big stupid smile.
Everything the government does is of public interest. There are a few things like national security or war planning that perhaps should be kept secret. However, everything that isn't explicitly exempted should be made public. It's also interesting that the companies involved in these discussions are alleged to be "people" or more specifically as "non government organizations" they are supposed to be in the same "public" group, yet they are part of the secret discussions... Of course TFA is about Australia and I thinking American.
Except the shock cone of say, an SR-71 Blackbird, originate at the nose and inlet cones of the aircraft, and these are specifically designed to keep the shockwaves ahead of the engines, and thus keep the airflow in the engines subsonic.
I read that the bow shock on the SR-71 goes into the engines at around mach 3. This provides the engines with pre-compressed air and fuel efficiency actually increases at that point. An old article written by one of the pilots had 2 highlights that I remember - 1) if you're on a mission at high speed and you're running out of fuel, GO FASTER it gets better mpg. 2) You light the afterburners for takeoff, and they generally don't ignite at the same time, so you immediately have to correct a large yaw moment on the ground as your accelerating at an astounding rate.
The law is the law - you must have insurance in your EU or US state. Whether that law is enforced with human eyes or camera eyes really makes no difference (IMHO). I have to waste ~$300 a year to insure other drivers & their cars in case I hit them..... I don't see why anyone else thinks they shouldn't have to pay the bill too.
1) who do the cameras belong to? So the state wants to use privately owned cameras eh? I suppose they could ban sale of fuel until the business can verify a legal vehicle, but then...
2) Checking plates against a centralized database is also going to create a record of peoples movements - i.e. tracking of every vehicle. Gotta ask if you want that.
It is a bit late to get it as a standard, but I would rather have had an opt-in instead of an opt-out.
You have always had the option of not putting material on a publicly accessible web server. Google does you a favor by indexing it for free so people can do a quick search and find it. They also make it very easy to opt-out. I'm not sure what this publicly available but "opt-in" concept you have would look like. Perhaps you could do a prototype which we could all go opt into after we hear about it ummmm how?
We generated 96% of our revenues in 2011 from our advertisers.
This actually doesn't say ANYTHING about the value of their other services. YouTube doesn't directly generate money but there sure are a lot of ads on there. To use an analogy, TV shows are an expense, but they get people to watch the ads.
There is a myth that companies have "fiduciary responsibility" to their shareholders. This is only true to the extent that the management should not steal the profits or do grossly irresponsible things to the company. As proof of my assertion, lets consider that some industries are inherently more profitable than others (commodities tend to have low returns). If "best possible returns" was the only goal then any CEO in one of the less profitable industries should sell all the assets and turn the "company" into a hedge fund investing in those industries that are more profitable.
A company should simply be required to state publicly what it does - it's up the individual investors to decide if they think that business is a good investment. If someone bought Google because the stock was going up like a rocket at some point and then sees all the "waste" and want to change something, they should just change their investment choice - not change the thing that they thought was a good investment.
They mean money should not be spent on things that can not be instantly monetized. That's what was killing Bell Labs ; once they went the instant monetize project route it was all wine and roses.
I believe that comment was pure sarcasm that got modded insightful by people who don't know anything about when and what useful stuff came out of Bell Labs. Unix (MacOS anyone?) and C for example were organically grown, not part of some grand business plan. On the other hand, look at where they are now, years after they started focusing on things that could be "monetized". Oh right, they don't exist any more.
The key is not to squash the free thinking and various projects - that kills the innovation. The key is to look at all the projects and figure out which ones can be monetized and turn them into "more official" projects. The ones that aren't going anywhere are not to be hunted down and killed - they'll die on their own so long as people are free to switch to something else. Hindsight is 20/20, but innovation requires some randomness.
It's not the fuel that is dirty. The thermodynamic cycle in both engine types is the same. The maximum efficiency of that cycle is a function of compression ratio. To get gas engines more efficient you can increase the compression ratio but then you run into premature ignition, incomplete combustion, and particulate emissions. Diesel fuel and engines rely on compression for ignition and hence require high compression ratios. I think the fuel is more likely to produce particulates, but gas can as well under similar conditions.
At the time they were postponing publication of the research there was no published scientific research that showed the danger of exposure to Diesel exhausts.
That's strange. I've known fine particulates are carcinogenic for at least 10 years. Where I read this I don't even know any more, but I've considered it a fact for some time. Diesel particulates seem to be specifically called out in whatever ancient source my mind recalls this from. To me, the cancer link is very old news, Suppression of this particular paper may be news, but not its content.
This is easy math. If a car gets 25mpg (average) and you drive it for 100K miles, that's 4000 gallons of gas. At $4 per gallon you'll be spending $16K on gas over that distance. If you drive the car for 150K miles that will be $24K in gas. If gas prices vary, you can do the math for that too. But you WILL spend $15-20K for gas over the life of a car. So the question becomes how much will the electricity save (about 75% in some places) and for the time you run a volt on gas, how much will the 30-35mpg save? I'd agree that it looks like a wash for many people, but if the volumes go up the price will come down and then it will be an easy choice. But then it seems demand is weak....
First, it's not the same setup as a prius. It has clutches to engage and things. I'm assuming (sorry) that those are hydraulic clutches since most of the trans is carry-over from the 2-mode which. Hydraulic clutches suck because the fluid need pressure and has some flow rate - i.e. the hydraulics require ENERGY. A prius/fusion/etc use the motion of the parts to splash oil around for lubrication, but have no significant hydraulic loads. This means a Volt expends energy in the transmission that is not used to propel the vehicle and is less efficient - It's only a 30-35mpg hybrid, which is not that great. In all-electric mode, they would have been better off as a plain series-hybrid with a little bigger motor and generator and no clutches or brakes. There would also be no question what type of car it is.
This is contingent on my *assumption* of hydraulic clutches.
How about if the elected folks actually try writing some laws instead of "introducing legislation" written up by industry. That's what they're supposed to be doing right? Take input from everyone, figure out (not be told) how to tweak things to make the country better, write up a bill, build consensus and get it passed. They're currently introducing some 200 bills per month because it's industry writing them, not the "law makers". It's no longer just lobbying but "here get this passed for me".
They should have revision control with public read-access. That way we could see who's making the edits.
The problem with the dividend approach, which is why it has been disfavored, is that it has adverse tax consequences in the US. If you buy shares of X and they grow by 5% annually, they can either issue that money in dividends every year and have no stock appreciation, or they can hold all the money and their stock price will go up by 5% (or they can split the difference and issue less than the entire amount as a dividend, obviously). However, if the company issues a dividend, the entire amount is taxable to the stockholder immediately. By contrast, if you sell 5% of your holdings every year, the tax due is only on the appreciation rather than on the full amount: If you buy 2000 shares at $10, and the price goes up to $10.5 and you sell ~95 shares to take your ~$1000 in profits, you owe immediate tax on only $47.50 (95 * ($10.50 - $10.00)) rather than on the full $1000 as you would in the case of the increase being issued as a dividend. More importantly, if you want all returns from your shares to stay invested in the company, with stock appreciation you owe no taxes whatsoever whereas with a dividend you still owe taxes on $1000 even if you immediately use it to buy more stock.
You pay capital gains tax on your "profit" either way. One issue is that IIRC dividends are paid out after the corporate income tax, so some feel they are taxed twice. Change that and dividends are the only way because.... Your reliance on stock splits implies the company will grow exponentially and indefinitely - something that is not mathematically possible. Your percent ownership in the company decreases (exponentially) every time you sell that 5 percent of your holdings. With dividends no company growth is required - the company does not even have to grow with inflation because you get your return quarterly and it's up to you to reinvest it if you want it compounded. Growth is still good, but it's not a required part of the strategy. Unbounded exponential growth on the other hand is impossible.
The problem is you're playing the greater fool game. If you intend to make money by selling a stock at a later date, then what you're saying is that you think you can find someone willing to buy AFTER you got the value out of it. Your buying strategy is also then based on inside information, "intuition" or some other divine insight, otherwise people would have already known and driven the price up. Another downside is that you have to actually SELL your assets to get any money from them.
The old school way which is now gaining popularity again is to buy companies that pay dividends. This gives you a return without finding a fool to sell to or cashing out. It's how it's supposed to work. If the stock goes down, it's not even relevant unless they cut the dividend (there is eventually a correlation there). Now a few words about yield. A company can only pay (long term, at most) a dividend of 1/PE where PE is the price/earnings ratio. So a PE of 20 means they can potentially pay a 5% dividend if they pay out all the earnings. A PE of 10 is potentially "undervalued" in this regard. Apple with a PE around 15 isn't actually bad, they should probably just start paying a dividend based on earnings and keep the pile of cash for a rainy day. Then the dividend could be kept up during tough times.
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Why do you care what battery type they use? You should be happy that battery replacement is not an issue because NiMH are well developed and understood.
Ultracapacitors have no place in hybrid cars. They are low voltage just like battery cells, so you have to connect a lot of them in series to reach 150V or higher. They are low capacity compared to chemical cells, so they don't compete on cost. Some people think using both is good, but now you've go more components overall and then there's the issue that just connecting them in parallel with a battery doesn't actually do anything for you.
An ultra-cap only solution could be nice if they had even higher capacity than today.
Hybrids CAN pay for themselves on a couple conditions. #1 you must use the vehicle for 100K miles or more. #2 you must be able to do math #3 you probably need to be doing a lot of city driving.
Let's do some math for the 2012 Ford Fusion Over 100K miles at 26mpg you will burn 3846 gallons of gas.
At $3.50 per gallon that's $13461 in gas.
For the hybrid, it's 39mpg (combined as is the 26 figure above). so this works out to $8974 in gas.
For a savings of $4487.
If I recall correctly, the price adder for that car was higher than that, so not a win. However, the savings goes up by 50 percent if you drive it for 150K miles. The savings will also go up with gas prices. It also gets better if you do predominantly city driving (I used the generic "combined" EPA figures). At some point it will be a net savings. This trivial example also neglects some other nice things like not wearing out your brake rotors (a non-trivial cost) or reduced number of oil changes (a trivial cost). It also neglects the cost of battery replacement - something which people worry about but I have not heard being a real world issue.
A Prius OTOH can be had for much closer to $20K and is generally a winner compared to any non-hybrid car so long as you drive 100K miles. I'm not a fan of it and would not buy one.
As volumes go up we can also expect the cost differential to come down.
So there we have the reason - it's not obvious weather you save dollars. Many people actually DO save money with a hybrid - particularly Prius owners.
I've often considered the issue of negotiating price of an item. One thing that seems fair is to take the average of the sellers lowest acceptable price and the buyers maximum price. Even if they could agree that this is "fair", getting them both to play without lying seems a near impossibility.
It's an open question in physics weather antimatter will fall toward earth or move away from it due to gravity. Is there any chance this scale could weigh an atom of anti-hydrogen?
Then they should upgrade the link.
If you have one solar cell and want to install it at a particular latitude, there is a specific orientation that will produce the most energy over a day. All cells should be in that orientation to maximize their individual energy production. This is what leads to fixed installations being large flat arrays with every cell in the same orientation. If you have 100 cells it is true that you can put 50 of them facing more to the easy and 50 more to the west, and you may be able to do this with less land area than all 100 laid out facing south. It will also be true that it produces LESS energy than the large flat array of 100. We can also add a tracker to the flat array and gather more total energy than EITHER fixed structure through the day.
By far, the cost of the cells is more than any other component, so each one needs to produce the maximum energy and that leads to all of them being in the same orientation. A sun tracker can be cheaper than adding additional cells, so that's a good way to increase output. Building upward is an obvious way to get more cells per land area, but this is both obvious and silly. This is the second time I've seen an article talking about power per land area instead of power per cell area (actual cell efficiency) or watts per dollar.
Beyond that, the control/inverter is another big cost. Each cell has an optimal Voltage/Current operating point given the angle and intensity of light falling on it. As soon as you put 2 strings of cells in different orientations, they need to operate at different voltages or currents for optimal conversion efficiency which will require multiple inverters rather than just a bigger capacity one. This is a second way these non-optimal systems cost more.
The problem with 720 is that they don't seem to be making 720 panels any more. It's always 1366x768. This requires that the source video be stretched by 16/15 which is impossible to do without blurring everything a little. Normally scaling 720 to 1080 is a 1.5x which is reasonable to do. Also scaling 1080 down to 720 is easy to do while keeping a good picture. Scaling either of these native resolutions to 768 causes problems.
IMHO this is an industry wide effort to make 720 TVs look worse than 1080 even when viewing 720p video. There really is no other explanation. I've heard claims about standard size glass which is all made for the 1080 world, but that doesn't hold up. I'd prefer a 30" 720 to a 32" 768 - just throw away the extra glass - or just give me "native" mode and put a black border around the extra 48 pixels (24 top, 24 bottom). Anything is better than converting 720 to 768.
And if you use the left hand at 1:00 or 2:00 position it will break your arm in multiple places and then use the pieces to smash your face. Same for right hand at 11:00.
The place I get mine cut uses phone number. They record notes about how you wanted your hair cut so they don't have to ask a lot of question next time. For this purpose it would be nice to have a fake phone number that you can always use.
One time the girl asked for my phone number and I replied something like "Can I get yours too?" with a big stupid smile.
Everything the government does is of public interest. There are a few things like national security or war planning that perhaps should be kept secret. However, everything that isn't explicitly exempted should be made public. It's also interesting that the companies involved in these discussions are alleged to be "people" or more specifically as "non government organizations" they are supposed to be in the same "public" group, yet they are part of the secret discussions... Of course TFA is about Australia and I thinking American.
I read that the bow shock on the SR-71 goes into the engines at around mach 3. This provides the engines with pre-compressed air and fuel efficiency actually increases at that point. An old article written by one of the pilots had 2 highlights that I remember - 1) if you're on a mission at high speed and you're running out of fuel, GO FASTER it gets better mpg. 2) You light the afterburners for takeoff, and they generally don't ignite at the same time, so you immediately have to correct a large yaw moment on the ground as your accelerating at an astounding rate.
1) who do the cameras belong to? So the state wants to use privately owned cameras eh? I suppose they could ban sale of fuel until the business can verify a legal vehicle, but then...
2) Checking plates against a centralized database is also going to create a record of peoples movements - i.e. tracking of every vehicle. Gotta ask if you want that.
The campground should make a site with lots of nice pictures and have some other sites do a few fluff pieces on them.
You have always had the option of not putting material on a publicly accessible web server. Google does you a favor by indexing it for free so people can do a quick search and find it. They also make it very easy to opt-out. I'm not sure what this publicly available but "opt-in" concept you have would look like. Perhaps you could do a prototype which we could all go opt into after we hear about it ummmm how?
This actually doesn't say ANYTHING about the value of their other services. YouTube doesn't directly generate money but there sure are a lot of ads on there. To use an analogy, TV shows are an expense, but they get people to watch the ads.
There is a myth that companies have "fiduciary responsibility" to their shareholders. This is only true to the extent that the management should not steal the profits or do grossly irresponsible things to the company. As proof of my assertion, lets consider that some industries are inherently more profitable than others (commodities tend to have low returns). If "best possible returns" was the only goal then any CEO in one of the less profitable industries should sell all the assets and turn the "company" into a hedge fund investing in those industries that are more profitable.
A company should simply be required to state publicly what it does - it's up the individual investors to decide if they think that business is a good investment. If someone bought Google because the stock was going up like a rocket at some point and then sees all the "waste" and want to change something, they should just change their investment choice - not change the thing that they thought was a good investment.
I believe that comment was pure sarcasm that got modded insightful by people who don't know anything about when and what useful stuff came out of Bell Labs. Unix (MacOS anyone?) and C for example were organically grown, not part of some grand business plan. On the other hand, look at where they are now, years after they started focusing on things that could be "monetized". Oh right, they don't exist any more.
The key is not to squash the free thinking and various projects - that kills the innovation. The key is to look at all the projects and figure out which ones can be monetized and turn them into "more official" projects. The ones that aren't going anywhere are not to be hunted down and killed - they'll die on their own so long as people are free to switch to something else. Hindsight is 20/20, but innovation requires some randomness.
It's not the fuel that is dirty. The thermodynamic cycle in both engine types is the same. The maximum efficiency of that cycle is a function of compression ratio. To get gas engines more efficient you can increase the compression ratio but then you run into premature ignition, incomplete combustion, and particulate emissions. Diesel fuel and engines rely on compression for ignition and hence require high compression ratios. I think the fuel is more likely to produce particulates, but gas can as well under similar conditions.
That's strange. I've known fine particulates are carcinogenic for at least 10 years. Where I read this I don't even know any more, but I've considered it a fact for some time. Diesel particulates seem to be specifically called out in whatever ancient source my mind recalls this from. To me, the cancer link is very old news, Suppression of this particular paper may be news, but not its content.
This is easy math. If a car gets 25mpg (average) and you drive it for 100K miles, that's 4000 gallons of gas. At $4 per gallon you'll be spending $16K on gas over that distance. If you drive the car for 150K miles that will be $24K in gas. If gas prices vary, you can do the math for that too. But you WILL spend $15-20K for gas over the life of a car. So the question becomes how much will the electricity save (about 75% in some places) and for the time you run a volt on gas, how much will the 30-35mpg save? I'd agree that it looks like a wash for many people, but if the volumes go up the price will come down and then it will be an easy choice. But then it seems demand is weak....
First, it's not the same setup as a prius. It has clutches to engage and things. I'm assuming (sorry) that those are hydraulic clutches since most of the trans is carry-over from the 2-mode which. Hydraulic clutches suck because the fluid need pressure and has some flow rate - i.e. the hydraulics require ENERGY. A prius/fusion/etc use the motion of the parts to splash oil around for lubrication, but have no significant hydraulic loads. This means a Volt expends energy in the transmission that is not used to propel the vehicle and is less efficient - It's only a 30-35mpg hybrid, which is not that great. In all-electric mode, they would have been better off as a plain series-hybrid with a little bigger motor and generator and no clutches or brakes. There would also be no question what type of car it is.
This is contingent on my *assumption* of hydraulic clutches.
How about if the elected folks actually try writing some laws instead of "introducing legislation" written up by industry. That's what they're supposed to be doing right? Take input from everyone, figure out (not be told) how to tweak things to make the country better, write up a bill, build consensus and get it passed. They're currently introducing some 200 bills per month because it's industry writing them, not the "law makers". It's no longer just lobbying but "here get this passed for me".
They should have revision control with public read-access. That way we could see who's making the edits.
If you get the chance, stop by Laser Reflections.
You pay capital gains tax on your "profit" either way. One issue is that IIRC dividends are paid out after the corporate income tax, so some feel they are taxed twice. Change that and dividends are the only way because.... Your reliance on stock splits implies the company will grow exponentially and indefinitely - something that is not mathematically possible. Your percent ownership in the company decreases (exponentially) every time you sell that 5 percent of your holdings. With dividends no company growth is required - the company does not even have to grow with inflation because you get your return quarterly and it's up to you to reinvest it if you want it compounded. Growth is still good, but it's not a required part of the strategy. Unbounded exponential growth on the other hand is impossible.
The problem is you're playing the greater fool game. If you intend to make money by selling a stock at a later date, then what you're saying is that you think you can find someone willing to buy AFTER you got the value out of it. Your buying strategy is also then based on inside information, "intuition" or some other divine insight, otherwise people would have already known and driven the price up. Another downside is that you have to actually SELL your assets to get any money from them.
The old school way which is now gaining popularity again is to buy companies that pay dividends. This gives you a return without finding a fool to sell to or cashing out. It's how it's supposed to work. If the stock goes down, it's not even relevant unless they cut the dividend (there is eventually a correlation there). Now a few words about yield. A company can only pay (long term, at most) a dividend of 1/PE where PE is the price/earnings ratio. So a PE of 20 means they can potentially pay a 5% dividend if they pay out all the earnings. A PE of 10 is potentially "undervalued" in this regard. Apple with a PE around 15 isn't actually bad, they should probably just start paying a dividend based on earnings and keep the pile of cash for a rainy day. Then the dividend could be kept up during tough times.