Oh, I can be reasoned with. It does however require that you present me with a reasonable argument.
Here's what it boils down to. If we, as a society, are going to start eliminating obnoxious behavior through force of law or regulation, then pretty much every enjoyable activity of any sort will need to be eliminated. There is not a person walking on the face of this planet that is free from behavior that someone else finds obnoxious.
A much better solution is for people to just get on with their lives and stop being such whiny little spoiled children. The government is not a tool to be used to shape the world into your own personal little idea of paradise.
That works, too. The primary point being that a PC is not a fragile little flower that's going to shatter into a billion pieces if somebody looks at it wrong. Stuff it in a box and load it on the truck/boat. Put some padding around any lcd screens. Call it good.
Not sure why a VPN is necessary. Just leave a drive behind and have a friend put up a temporary FTP server when you're ready to retrieve the data. Or use cloud storage. Between dropbox, skydrive, google drive, sugarsync, and several others, I think I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 GB of free cloud storage I could use for such a purpose. Actually paying those folks a small sum would allow me to dramatically increase that amount.
If you don't count music, movies, etc... that can be easily and readily replaced and only take into account actual "personal" data like financial records, pictures, documents, etc... most people could easily back up all of their hard to replace stuff using nothing but free cloud storage. Certain professions or hobbies would generate larger amounts and require a paid solution, or a different approach altogether.
why do I have to pay extra taxes so that a council can make a special smoking area in a park, or in the price of my meal, subsidize the cost of the restaurant to build a special smoking area?
Because whiny little prima donna assholes insist that they be provided with a sheltered space free from odors that they personally find unpleasant. My smoking does not necessitate any of those things. Your whining does.
Yep, have a backup of important data that you carry on your person during the trip. The hardware can pretty much be haphazardly stuffed into boxes and not worried about.
Computers are not the delicate, fragile devices that so many people insist on treating them as. If they were laptops could not exist.
Tobacco users are actively making a choice to do something that is unquestionably unhealthy.
Please provide the/. community with a detailed list of every food item and beverage that you have consumed in the past year. Also include a list of all activities, recreational or otherwise, that you have engaged in. It shouldn't take us long to find a multitude of sins that you ought to be fired for.
An argument could possibly be made for excluding smokers from the company health plan, but denying them employment altogether is ridiculously extreme.
Very typical attitude these days. Everybody is all gung-ho about getting rid of all this pesky freedom, right up until something that they enjoy comes up on the list.
It's not *always* great, but I've had mostly good luck.
The only real problem I run into is pictures landing in the wrong spots so they don't match their caption. For a novel, not a big deal. For a reference book, probably a showstopper. But even that can be rectified with a little work.
Anyway, my point was only that "worthless" was too strong a term. I fully agree that a device that can just use X format directly is a better tool than one that requires conversion.
Those who drive or ride in motorized vehicles are involved in a much higher number of car crashes than those who don't, thus driving up insurance rates. And lost productivity from injured drivers who can't report to work because they're hospitalized.
Clearly drivers are causing an undue burden and need to be eliminated.
To me, walking past someone who is smoking is about as pleasant as walking past someone urinating against a wall.
As a result, we have designated locations for urination, just as there are designated locations for smoking.
When you're outside in public, you do not have a "right" to not encounter unpleasantness. From livestock farms to factories to women with too much perfume, I encounter unpleasant scents all day, every day.
Encountering things you don't like is just a fact of life. Grow up and deal with it.
As another lifelong smoker, I'll chime in and say that is 100% true. Advertising has zero effect on me.
Addiction is "cool" like that. There is no need to advertise in order to get an addict to satisfy his addiction. His body and mind are already telling him that he must do so, and at a deep, instinctual level. The only way to explain it to someone who has been fortunate enough to avoid any form of addiction is to say that the drive is AT LEAST as powerful as the drive to eat when your hungry is. Depending on the substance in question, the drive can be every bit as powerful as the drive to breath.
So, yeah, the only need for advertising is to get new people to voluntarily submit to that scenario.
You've oversimplified the problem. In particular, you're not accounting for the wide range of efficiencies an ICE will display depending on different possible RPM/load combinations. The efficiency of a conventional vehicle will vary widely with driving conditions. You can design the transmission so that the engine is at its peak efficiency at, say, 55mph, but then what happens with city driving? In real world driving conditions a conventional vehicle spends only a small portion of its time running at that ideal RPM. Also, with a conventional vehicle, every last drop of fuel that is burnt while idling (sitting at a stoplight) is completely wasted.
With an electric vehicle, the ICE can run at its absolute peak efficiency 100% of the time that it is running. If the engine is running while sitting at a stoplight, the output is stored in batteries for later use, so every drop of fuel it consumes is used, not wasted.
Assuming that you're using current technology for both engines (no comparing a 2012 diesel car to a generator built in 1965), then in real world applications the electric vehicle should always come out ahead. It would be possible to construct a test scenario where the results were very close, but that wouldn't reflect the way people actually use their vehicles.
TLDR; Your equations fail to account for lots of factors that come into play during real world driving.
Also,
friction contact of clutch to output shaft-> \times ratio_c_3
If you're losing non-trivial amounts of power in the clutch, get your car to a mechanic. Either the clutch plate or pressure plate is shot.
You're contradicting yourself here. By having the wealthy go out and buy clean very-low pollution vehicles, they end up selling their well-maintained low- pollution vehicle to the less wealthy person. In the end - a dirty clunker will end up off the road (or at least driven less).
I don't think I am. What you're saying is certainly true, but I'll stand by my statement within the confines of the 10 year time frame that I was replying to. Those expensive new EVs won't be making their way to the buy-here/pay-here lots anytime in the near future. 10 years is probably when the very first ones will have been beaten up and worn out enough to be affordable by the clunker driving crowd. And that's assuming the battery replacements they'll be needing by then EVER become affordable for that group.
I own an EV and I agree that EVs will continue to remain a small part of the market for the next 10 years, but I guess one has to know what your definition of "mainstream" is.
I'm not sure what kind of definition I'd put on it. At least half the cars on the road? When seeing a gasoline powered vehicle is actually unusual? But to illustrate how close to mainstream they aren't, I spend a lot of time on the road. A lot. Since they came out I've seen exactly ONE Volt "in the wild". Purely anecdotal, I know, but still....
Not a bad idea, but still 20 lbs of propane is the energy equivalent of about 3.4 gallons of gasoline. I guess if you could build a propane ICE as efficient as a Prius (50 mpg) that would be sufficient, that'd be OK if your goal is longer range transportation.
So throw 4 20lb cylinders in the back, and you have the equivalent of 13.6 gallons of gas. Right in the range of the fuel capacity of a lot of small cars. Admittedly, the designers would have to get creative to have a place to put them that didn't chew up all the cargo space and was still reasonably accessible for swapping tanks. A better "perfect world" solution would be a permanent tank on the car that would be filled in place. But the infrastructure for that isn't there yet, so swapable tanks makes a good interim solution.
Given that a generator can be designed to operate at the ideal RPM range for the engine, achieving high efficiency is a much smaller problem than it is in a conventional vehicle engine which must operate at a wide variety of RPMs. If you could achieve that 50 mpg range, those 4 tanks would give you a 680 mile range, so really, given the 300ish mile range that is typical of conventional vehicles, you could get away with only having two tanks onboard.
I know they have at least one account that isn't "used", but simply sits there for that one time every 18 months or so a family member posts a picture that I actually have an interest in looking at.
I'm sure I'm not the only one out of those billion that doesn't give a crap about information being transmitted to me in real time.
If this trend continues, the further development of the internet is coming to a standstill. Entire industries will die (streaming, online games etc).
I wonder how far the trend can realistically go, though?
Comparing to AU and NZ isn't really apples to apples. It's a different environment, with different consumer expectations.
There are a large number of Internet customers these days in the US who have it pretty much solely for streaming entertainment. My MIL doesn't use email, doesn't play games, could care less about shopping on Amazon, but she absolutely loves streaming Netlix movies. That's all she uses the 'net for. And she's not all that unusual.
If they push the data caps too far, there will be a huge backlash with people cancelling service because it's no longer useful for the things they originally subscribed for.
If they set caps at a level where people can still do what they're used to, then as much as I despise the idea of caps, it's probably not a really huge deal.
I know that if caps prevent me from streaming entertainment as I do now, I will find Verizon's mobile hotspot very tempting. It's plenty fast for pretty much everything else I do, and if I have to live with a cap either way, then the ability to have my connectivity be mobile is a huge bonus.
Some countries get away with it because the customers never had unlimited in the first place. But here in the US people have entire home entertainment infrastructures based on the fact that their bandwidth is unlimited. You can't just take that away and not face a backlash. You can't take that away and not create a huge demand for independent WISPs who will step up and deliver what customers want.
I just don't see the situation getting as dire as some are forecasting. Of course, I've been wrong before.
I dunno. I'm 41, and I still love tech and still love learning. But with age my horizons have broadened and tech isn't the central focus of my life anymore. It doesn't bother me if some great new thing comes out and I don't hear about it until a few days or weeks later.
And my learning is much more based on practical matters these days. When I learned Perl, I did it because it sounded cool and I just plain wanted to learn it. Now I don't invest the time unless it's either going to make me money, or I'm going to put it to use in my home somehow.
I can definitely relate to the OP. I still love technology and learning, but my interests are much more broad these days and I find it more satisfying to spend a weekend relaxing on a boat or hiking in the woods than sitting at a keyboard learning some obscure language just to be able to say I know it.
Yeah, I wish I could get that expense down, but it is what it is. At the moment, financial survival requires a lot of driving, and nearly all of that is done with a trailer in tow. So I can't really reduce miles or switch to a more efficient vehicle. But even if solar could only replace 1/4 of what I use, $2500 multiplied by a few years would still justify the cost of a pretty decent solar rig. The problem today is finding a vehicle that can utilize electric power AND be capable of doing harder work than just carrying human passengers from A to B. There are a few, but their cost completely wipes out any benefit and then some.
I haven't run the numbers on solar cost as it applies to electric vehicles, but I have looked into solar for other applications. 4 or 6 panels can really go a long way if you pay attention to not wasting power and using efficient devices.
I don't know what the "sweet spot" would be as far as solar power to charge an EV, but it would be an interesting thing to figure out. In the best case, which would be an EV only used within the city limits (no long trips) and able to return to home base daily for charging, my suspicion is that my 10 grand number would get you a system capable of paying for itself in a very short time frame (under 5 years).
Obviously each use case is going to be different. A small car carrying a single passenger back and forth to work is a different problem to solve than a work truck hauling 1000 lbs of tools and pulling a 5000 lb trailer.
But, that small car carrying a single person to work is one of the most common cases out there.
Really, the EV advocates are going about it all wrong. They should forget the environmental aspect and focus on the financial.
At current prices a full tank of gas costs me about $95. I have to do that twice a week. Ouch.
Throw a plug-in hybrid in my driveway and suddenly a 10 grand solar system on my roof starts to make financial sense. Grid-tie solar for the purpose of replacing household electricity currently has a payback time of 20+ years. That 10 grand represents what I spend on gasoline in just one year, and that number is only going to increase. Now, I don't expect that it would provide 100% of the vehicles electrical demand, but I'd bet that the payback would be more along the lines of 3 or 4 years, rather than 20 or more.
Then, once you've got the solar infrastructure installed on the home, adding additional panels to supplement household use becomes more financially attractive.
You want to save the planet? Fine. Make clean energy make financial sense.
The advantage of the small diesel is that it can provide charging at all speeds including idle speed.
Actually, the big advantage of decoupling the IC engine from the drivetrain is that when the IC must be used, it can run at its ideal RPM range at all times, independent of vehicle speed. That means that 10 gallons of diesel burned in a hybrid vehicle will produce less pollution than the same 10 gallons burned in a conventional diesel vehicle.
Would anyone seriously bet against electric cars on a ten year time-span?
Yep, I would. Up until now they've basically been nothing but a feel-good novelty, and I've seen no real signs of that changing.
And then there's the fact that the people who can afford a new electric vehicle are already driving newer, well-maintained, low-pollution vehicles anyway. The old, unmaintained, clunkers, driven by people who can't just run to the dealership and buy a new car on a whim, will continue to be driven and continue to pollute for a long time to come.
Add in the severe range limitations of electric vehicles, and the lack of progress on addressing that issue, and I think 10 years is FAR too short of a time frame to bet on electric vehicles becoming mainstream. Plug-in hybrids? Maybe. Pure electric? Zero chance.
If you want a practical, low-pollution alternative, the best bet would be a plug-in hybrid that burns propane in the internal combustion engine. Much cleaner than gasoline/diesel, and I can swap an empty 20# propane tank for a full one in any populated area nationwide.
Yep, it is. Not involving the DP, but here's two cases. I personally know both of these guys....
#1. 3rd offense OWI. No injuries, no property damage.
Time served: 3 years, 2 month.
#2. Assault with a deadly weapon. Beat the shit out of someone with an aluminum baseball bat. Guy nearly died. Girlfriend came to see him in the hospital and didn't recognize him due to the facial damage.
Time served: 13 months.
So, apparently, doing something that "could" or "might" cause harm is worse than intentionally doing actual harm.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I can be reasoned with. It does however require that you present me with a reasonable argument.
Here's what it boils down to. If we, as a society, are going to start eliminating obnoxious behavior through force of law or regulation, then pretty much every enjoyable activity of any sort will need to be eliminated. There is not a person walking on the face of this planet that is free from behavior that someone else finds obnoxious.
A much better solution is for people to just get on with their lives and stop being such whiny little spoiled children. The government is not a tool to be used to shape the world into your own personal little idea of paradise.
That works, too. The primary point being that a PC is not a fragile little flower that's going to shatter into a billion pieces if somebody looks at it wrong. Stuff it in a box and load it on the truck/boat. Put some padding around any lcd screens. Call it good.
Not sure why a VPN is necessary. Just leave a drive behind and have a friend put up a temporary FTP server when you're ready to retrieve the data. Or use cloud storage. Between dropbox, skydrive, google drive, sugarsync, and several others, I think I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 GB of free cloud storage I could use for such a purpose. Actually paying those folks a small sum would allow me to dramatically increase that amount.
If you don't count music, movies, etc... that can be easily and readily replaced and only take into account actual "personal" data like financial records, pictures, documents, etc... most people could easily back up all of their hard to replace stuff using nothing but free cloud storage. Certain professions or hobbies would generate larger amounts and require a paid solution, or a different approach altogether.
why do I have to pay extra taxes so that a council can make a special smoking area in a park, or in the price of my meal, subsidize the cost of the restaurant to build a special smoking area?
Because whiny little prima donna assholes insist that they be provided with a sheltered space free from odors that they personally find unpleasant. My smoking does not necessitate any of those things. Your whining does.
Yep, have a backup of important data that you carry on your person during the trip. The hardware can pretty much be haphazardly stuffed into boxes and not worried about.
Computers are not the delicate, fragile devices that so many people insist on treating them as. If they were laptops could not exist.
classifies me as a "non-smoker" because I smoke less than a pack a day..
So do I!*
*(On days when I am broke, incarcerated, hospitalized, or otherwise forcibly prevented from smoking)
Insurance companies love fine print, right?
Tobacco users are actively making a choice to do something that is unquestionably unhealthy.
Please provide the /. community with a detailed list of every food item and beverage that you have consumed in the past year. Also include a list of all activities, recreational or otherwise, that you have engaged in. It shouldn't take us long to find a multitude of sins that you ought to be fired for.
An argument could possibly be made for excluding smokers from the company health plan, but denying them employment altogether is ridiculously extreme.
Very typical attitude these days. Everybody is all gung-ho about getting rid of all this pesky freedom, right up until something that they enjoy comes up on the list.
Pretty pathetic and depressing, really.
It's not *always* great, but I've had mostly good luck.
The only real problem I run into is pictures landing in the wrong spots so they don't match their caption. For a novel, not a big deal. For a reference book, probably a showstopper. But even that can be rectified with a little work.
Anyway, my point was only that "worthless" was too strong a term. I fully agree that a device that can just use X format directly is a better tool than one that requires conversion.
And motorized transportation. Don't forget that.
Those who drive or ride in motorized vehicles are involved in a much higher number of car crashes than those who don't, thus driving up insurance rates. And lost productivity from injured drivers who can't report to work because they're hospitalized.
Clearly drivers are causing an undue burden and need to be eliminated.
To me, walking past someone who is smoking is about as pleasant as walking past someone urinating against a wall.
As a result, we have designated locations for urination, just as there are designated locations for smoking.
When you're outside in public, you do not have a "right" to not encounter unpleasantness. From livestock farms to factories to women with too much perfume, I encounter unpleasant scents all day, every day.
Encountering things you don't like is just a fact of life. Grow up and deal with it.
As another lifelong smoker, I'll chime in and say that is 100% true. Advertising has zero effect on me.
Addiction is "cool" like that. There is no need to advertise in order to get an addict to satisfy his addiction. His body and mind are already telling him that he must do so, and at a deep, instinctual level. The only way to explain it to someone who has been fortunate enough to avoid any form of addiction is to say that the drive is AT LEAST as powerful as the drive to eat when your hungry is. Depending on the substance in question, the drive can be every bit as powerful as the drive to breath.
So, yeah, the only need for advertising is to get new people to voluntarily submit to that scenario.
You've oversimplified the problem. In particular, you're not accounting for the wide range of efficiencies an ICE will display depending on different possible RPM/load combinations. The efficiency of a conventional vehicle will vary widely with driving conditions. You can design the transmission so that the engine is at its peak efficiency at, say, 55mph, but then what happens with city driving? In real world driving conditions a conventional vehicle spends only a small portion of its time running at that ideal RPM. Also, with a conventional vehicle, every last drop of fuel that is burnt while idling (sitting at a stoplight) is completely wasted.
With an electric vehicle, the ICE can run at its absolute peak efficiency 100% of the time that it is running. If the engine is running while sitting at a stoplight, the output is stored in batteries for later use, so every drop of fuel it consumes is used, not wasted.
Assuming that you're using current technology for both engines (no comparing a 2012 diesel car to a generator built in 1965), then in real world applications the electric vehicle should always come out ahead. It would be possible to construct a test scenario where the results were very close, but that wouldn't reflect the way people actually use their vehicles.
TLDR; Your equations fail to account for lots of factors that come into play during real world driving.
Also,
friction contact of clutch to output shaft-> \times ratio_c_3
If you're losing non-trivial amounts of power in the clutch, get your car to a mechanic. Either the clutch plate or pressure plate is shot.
I wouldn't say worthless. More convenient, definitely.
Calibre makes it crazy easy to convert between ebook formats, so turning that epub into a pdf or mobi is pretty simple.
But, yes, if the option is available to read the epub directly, that is definitely preferable.
You're contradicting yourself here. By having the wealthy go out and buy clean very-low pollution vehicles, they end up selling their well-maintained low- pollution vehicle to the less wealthy person. In the end - a dirty clunker will end up off the road (or at least driven less).
I don't think I am. What you're saying is certainly true, but I'll stand by my statement within the confines of the 10 year time frame that I was replying to. Those expensive new EVs won't be making their way to the buy-here/pay-here lots anytime in the near future. 10 years is probably when the very first ones will have been beaten up and worn out enough to be affordable by the clunker driving crowd. And that's assuming the battery replacements they'll be needing by then EVER become affordable for that group.
I own an EV and I agree that EVs will continue to remain a small part of the market for the next 10 years, but I guess one has to know what your definition of "mainstream" is.
I'm not sure what kind of definition I'd put on it. At least half the cars on the road? When seeing a gasoline powered vehicle is actually unusual? But to illustrate how close to mainstream they aren't, I spend a lot of time on the road. A lot. Since they came out I've seen exactly ONE Volt "in the wild". Purely anecdotal, I know, but still....
Not a bad idea, but still 20 lbs of propane is the energy equivalent of about 3.4 gallons of gasoline. I guess if you could build a propane ICE as efficient as a Prius (50 mpg) that would be sufficient, that'd be OK if your goal is longer range transportation.
So throw 4 20lb cylinders in the back, and you have the equivalent of 13.6 gallons of gas. Right in the range of the fuel capacity of a lot of small cars. Admittedly, the designers would have to get creative to have a place to put them that didn't chew up all the cargo space and was still reasonably accessible for swapping tanks. A better "perfect world" solution would be a permanent tank on the car that would be filled in place. But the infrastructure for that isn't there yet, so swapable tanks makes a good interim solution.
Given that a generator can be designed to operate at the ideal RPM range for the engine, achieving high efficiency is a much smaller problem than it is in a conventional vehicle engine which must operate at a wide variety of RPMs. If you could achieve that 50 mpg range, those 4 tanks would give you a 680 mile range, so really, given the 300ish mile range that is typical of conventional vehicles, you could get away with only having two tanks onboard.
I know they have at least one account that isn't "used", but simply sits there for that one time every 18 months or so a family member posts a picture that I actually have an interest in looking at.
I'm sure I'm not the only one out of those billion that doesn't give a crap about information being transmitted to me in real time.
If this trend continues, the further development of the internet is coming to a standstill. Entire industries will die (streaming, online games etc).
I wonder how far the trend can realistically go, though?
Comparing to AU and NZ isn't really apples to apples. It's a different environment, with different consumer expectations.
There are a large number of Internet customers these days in the US who have it pretty much solely for streaming entertainment. My MIL doesn't use email, doesn't play games, could care less about shopping on Amazon, but she absolutely loves streaming Netlix movies. That's all she uses the 'net for. And she's not all that unusual.
If they push the data caps too far, there will be a huge backlash with people cancelling service because it's no longer useful for the things they originally subscribed for.
If they set caps at a level where people can still do what they're used to, then as much as I despise the idea of caps, it's probably not a really huge deal.
I know that if caps prevent me from streaming entertainment as I do now, I will find Verizon's mobile hotspot very tempting. It's plenty fast for pretty much everything else I do, and if I have to live with a cap either way, then the ability to have my connectivity be mobile is a huge bonus.
Some countries get away with it because the customers never had unlimited in the first place. But here in the US people have entire home entertainment infrastructures based on the fact that their bandwidth is unlimited. You can't just take that away and not face a backlash. You can't take that away and not create a huge demand for independent WISPs who will step up and deliver what customers want.
I just don't see the situation getting as dire as some are forecasting. Of course, I've been wrong before.
I dunno. I'm 41, and I still love tech and still love learning. But with age my horizons have broadened and tech isn't the central focus of my life anymore. It doesn't bother me if some great new thing comes out and I don't hear about it until a few days or weeks later.
And my learning is much more based on practical matters these days. When I learned Perl, I did it because it sounded cool and I just plain wanted to learn it. Now I don't invest the time unless it's either going to make me money, or I'm going to put it to use in my home somehow.
I can definitely relate to the OP. I still love technology and learning, but my interests are much more broad these days and I find it more satisfying to spend a weekend relaxing on a boat or hiking in the woods than sitting at a keyboard learning some obscure language just to be able to say I know it.
Yeah, I wish I could get that expense down, but it is what it is. At the moment, financial survival requires a lot of driving, and nearly all of that is done with a trailer in tow. So I can't really reduce miles or switch to a more efficient vehicle. But even if solar could only replace 1/4 of what I use, $2500 multiplied by a few years would still justify the cost of a pretty decent solar rig. The problem today is finding a vehicle that can utilize electric power AND be capable of doing harder work than just carrying human passengers from A to B. There are a few, but their cost completely wipes out any benefit and then some.
I haven't run the numbers on solar cost as it applies to electric vehicles, but I have looked into solar for other applications. 4 or 6 panels can really go a long way if you pay attention to not wasting power and using efficient devices.
I don't know what the "sweet spot" would be as far as solar power to charge an EV, but it would be an interesting thing to figure out. In the best case, which would be an EV only used within the city limits (no long trips) and able to return to home base daily for charging, my suspicion is that my 10 grand number would get you a system capable of paying for itself in a very short time frame (under 5 years).
Obviously each use case is going to be different. A small car carrying a single passenger back and forth to work is a different problem to solve than a work truck hauling 1000 lbs of tools and pulling a 5000 lb trailer.
But, that small car carrying a single person to work is one of the most common cases out there.
Some people have an anti-environmental agenda
Really, the EV advocates are going about it all wrong. They should forget the environmental aspect and focus on the financial.
At current prices a full tank of gas costs me about $95. I have to do that twice a week. Ouch.
Throw a plug-in hybrid in my driveway and suddenly a 10 grand solar system on my roof starts to make financial sense. Grid-tie solar for the purpose of replacing household electricity currently has a payback time of 20+ years. That 10 grand represents what I spend on gasoline in just one year, and that number is only going to increase. Now, I don't expect that it would provide 100% of the vehicles electrical demand, but I'd bet that the payback would be more along the lines of 3 or 4 years, rather than 20 or more.
Then, once you've got the solar infrastructure installed on the home, adding additional panels to supplement household use becomes more financially attractive.
You want to save the planet? Fine. Make clean energy make financial sense.
The advantage of the small diesel is that it can provide charging at all speeds including idle speed.
Actually, the big advantage of decoupling the IC engine from the drivetrain is that when the IC must be used, it can run at its ideal RPM range at all times, independent of vehicle speed. That means that 10 gallons of diesel burned in a hybrid vehicle will produce less pollution than the same 10 gallons burned in a conventional diesel vehicle.
EVs are mostly the same as any other car,
Spoken like someone who calls for help just to change a flat tire. Have you ever even looked under the hood of a car? Any car?
What a ridiculous statement.
Would anyone seriously bet against electric cars on a ten year time-span?
Yep, I would. Up until now they've basically been nothing but a feel-good novelty, and I've seen no real signs of that changing.
And then there's the fact that the people who can afford a new electric vehicle are already driving newer, well-maintained, low-pollution vehicles anyway. The old, unmaintained, clunkers, driven by people who can't just run to the dealership and buy a new car on a whim, will continue to be driven and continue to pollute for a long time to come.
Add in the severe range limitations of electric vehicles, and the lack of progress on addressing that issue, and I think 10 years is FAR too short of a time frame to bet on electric vehicles becoming mainstream. Plug-in hybrids? Maybe. Pure electric? Zero chance.
If you want a practical, low-pollution alternative, the best bet would be a plug-in hybrid that burns propane in the internal combustion engine. Much cleaner than gasoline/diesel, and I can swap an empty 20# propane tank for a full one in any populated area nationwide.
Our criminal justice system is flat busted.
Yep, it is. Not involving the DP, but here's two cases. I personally know both of these guys....
#1. 3rd offense OWI. No injuries, no property damage.
Time served: 3 years, 2 month.
#2. Assault with a deadly weapon. Beat the shit out of someone with an aluminum baseball bat. Guy nearly died. Girlfriend came to see him in the hospital and didn't recognize him due to the facial damage.
Time served: 13 months.
So, apparently, doing something that "could" or "might" cause harm is worse than intentionally doing actual harm.
Wrongful imprisonment for 10 or even 15 years is not on the same level as ending their life.
Spoken like a man who's never been locked up.
Although, I guess you are right, in a way. It's not on the same level. It's worse.
Yes, of course they are.
But probably not with this device.