So, what's the electrolyte in NiMH, and what's the pH, in order to produce the energy density which is substantially more than a lead-acid car battery?
I'll bow to your superior expertise in this area, but this is what information I had.
I have never seen a reference that lists NiMH batteries as being toxic (of course most material is not for 500v car batteries), they all list lead acid as such. NiMH use potassium hydroxide as the main electrolyte, its MSDS lists its toxicology as:
Corrosive - may cause serious burns. Harmful by ingestion, inhalation and in contact with skin. If the solid or solution comes into contact with the eyes, serious eye damage may result.
and the MSDS for sulfuric acid lists is as:Extremely corrosive, causes serious burns. Highly toxic. Harmful by inhalation, ingestion and through skin contact. Ingestion may be fatal. Skin contact can lead to extensive and severe burns. Chronic exposure may result in lung damage and possibly cancer.
That was concentrated sulpheric acid's MSDS, I haven't hada chance to look up the concentrations of the electrolytes in the batteries.
Then again, I might be speaking out of my ass. After all, I only took two years of electrochemistry in my electrical engineering courses in University. It can't compare with the high school chemistry you obviously didn't take - or the common sense you obviously don't have - to not understand the basics of how electrical energy density must correspond to chemical energy density.
Wow, I really must have said something that pissed you off. I'm sorry that I only took AP chem in high school and neglected it in college, but what does the energy density of the battery have to do with the long term toxic effects of lead and nickel? The acids are bad in both - that is true. If Toyota was using Li-Ion/Polymer batteries I would be much less enthusiastic with them, those batteries can be positively dangerous. I won't even use them in my remote control plane because of the risks that a crash can deliver. I've seen pictures of whole SUVs totaled because of a short in a Li-Ion pack that was in the trunk, and internal short was caused by a model airplane crash and the battery exploded 5 minutes later.
Yeah, but mechanics don't like wires, in case you haven't noticed. Buy one a beer sometime and chat with him (or her). If they liked wires, they'd be electricians or electronics technicians. Mechanics generally get into the trade because they like moving parts - sorry, it sucks,
That is a weak argument against hybrids, as you said "He [mechanic roomate] has asked me into the shop to diagnose and repair dozens of electrical problems on brand-new Toyota cars when the mechanics can't fix it." Pretty much every new car has plenty of wires and electronics in them, onboard computers, airbags; gone are the days of carburetors in cars. Shoot, the easiest upgrade and tune to my car is to reprogram the ECU. If they really hate wires that much they should get into the specialty market (e.g. classic cars, offroad racing or marine engine mechanic where many of the engines don't use fuel injection, I help my friend with his sand rail, loads of fun).
Poorly maintained cars are responsible for most of the pollution; age doesn't matter. Loads of people in 3-4 year old cars are failing emissions tests because their EGR valves are stuck open, PCV valves are stuck closed, or because their timing belts have jumped a notch. The beaters tend to be driven by people who actually know how to fix them, and hear every little knock or click and know to check things out.
I'd be curious to see the actual statistics on this - most of the obvious polluters (visible particulate exhaust) I've seen on the road are older than about 15 years, but most of the cars from before 1975 or so appear in good condition, being maintained by auto enthusiasts. Anecdotal I kno
If you believe it is, fine. However, you disagree with the American justice system, and a long tradition of anglo-saxon jurisprudence. Theft is depriving someone of something. If you copy someone's song when you have no right to do so, they still have their song. What you've done is infringe on their rights to copies of that song.
Interesting view of theft...that then implies that identity theft is not theft. They still have their identity, it just has been infringed upon by someone else. Now I'm not saying my parent post was implying that music 'piracy' was not wrong but it give copyright infringement a different perspective. Right now people seem to view downloading a few songs or pirated video games in the same way they would view stealing Bill Gates identity.
I'll happily tell it to the faithfully monogamous women. Their husbands 'tom-cattery' gave them aids, which could have been easily prevented by said husbands. It's the husbands fault clear and simple.
Look, I never said that anybody who gets HIV deverves what they get. I'm saying that in EVERY SINGLE case, somebody is to blame even if it isn't the most recent victim. A newborn gets infected by their mother. If somebody up the chain hadn't screwed around the baby would not have been infected.
You're right on one count though. I did forget about drug addicts sharing needles, as this is effectively a blood transfer.
Okay, so now we're up to "Don't share needles. Don't screw around."
Not very compassionate. Are you using this as a way to lobby against HIV/AIDS research? If so its like lobbying against doing research for safer cars because, if there is an auto accident, someone screwed up while driving and should have been driving safer.
If not and you are lobbying for abstinence, fine that is a viewpoint but keep in mind that it goes against millions of years of evolution. It will be much easier to convince the average person to use a condom than to be abstinent. So far there are no firm results that support abstinence education as working.
The current federal sex ed statistics are mostly useless, they went from tracking number of births and proportion of participants having sex to tracking the number of participants that remain in the program, and the number 'who indicate understanding of the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from premarital sexual activity' (see Dept of Health presentation). Not really comparable. Over the last decade California had the largest drop in the nation of teenage pregnancies (now the lowest in the country) with out abstinence only education.
... and people still won't accept the easiest (and in fact only certain) way to prevent the spread of AIDS:
Don't have promiscuious sex.
Sure, maybe we should stop doing research on high blood pressure and heart disease too, after all a good diet and exercise can cure both of those.
Maybe we should also ban all religions - after all that is the root cause of terrorism.
But you'd have a hard time getting a message like that past PC liberals who seem to have taken up key positions of authority, and those tribes in Africa who believe the best way to cure aids is to have sex with a virgin. I wonder who told them that.
Ohh, nice, I really like the way you subtly linked those PC liberals with HIV infected people that have sex with virgins, really shows class and tact on your part.
Not quite true: finding the potential cures is the cheap part - doing the rest of the work (seeing if it actually works, clinical trials, FDA hoops, etc) is the really expensive part. Oh yeah, almost forgot the high expense of nebulous advertising.
RTFA. The new virus IS HIV. The article specifically addresses the point you brought up:
[They]... designed a potential AIDS treatment that would remain with the patient as long as he or she has HIV, meaning it would prevent AIDS from arising even in patients who otherwise would have developed the disease after a decade of latency....It latches onto the natural HIV and spreads along with it, even from person to person.
The secrecy rules that are being used are in the Patriot act (RTFA) itself and not normal gag orders. They initially did not even allow the ACLU to reveal that there was a case! Currently they are still hiding who all the plaintiffs are and what parts of the law are being challenged. Here is a relevant article quote:
The ACLU first filed its lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of such demands, known as national security letters, on April 6, but the secrecy rules of the Patriot Act required the challenge to be filed under seal. A ruling April 28 allowed the release of a heavily censored version of the complaint, but the ACLU is still forbidden from revealing many details of the case, including the identity of another plaintiff who has joined in the lawsuit. The law forbids targets of national security letters to disclose that they have received one.
Well yes, it is a threat - so are the AAA maps, tourist gides and almanacs, should we regulate those, demeand photo ID with biometrics to purchase a map? (I know, the FBI and Almanacs)As an early poster pointed out we play into terrorist hands by being scared of this and limiting our information that is available.
If ever I saw a need for doing basic research before asking slashdot. I don't want to sound that snotty, but not knowing Cascades but having the Willamete and Kalamath rivers? As someone else pointed out the Cascades feed them; any casual glance at a map would have revealed that.
Thank God! We'll finally be able to shut up all of those moon landing hoax conspiracy theorists!
One would hope that this would but true (dis)believers will say any photo shown as proof of the moon landing is faked. There are people that insist the world in flat and that is alot easier to proove false.
You say, "In my mind, it's not a human until it has some form of sentient thought". A question: do infants have sentient thought? How do you measure sentient thought, anyway? How about severely mentally retarded people, or people with advanced Alzheimers? Are they not human either? This isn't a theoretical question.
howdy again
I would say a nervous system would be a prerequisite for being sentient. A dozen stem cells in a lab does not have sentient thought.
Consider this scenario: a woman has a child for the specific purpose of providing a donor heart to another woman's child who is sick. Of course, the heart will not be ready until the donor child is older, let's say six years old. At that point, the donor child's heart is removed and given to the other child. Of course, this means that the donor child will die. But since it was "created specifically for this purpose" (according to your terms), it's perfectly ethical.
This is a complete straw man argument, no one here was (seriously at least) arguing that one should bring a cell to term to harvest it, in fact none of the cells were ever even implanted or got beyond a few cell divisions.
Q: why can't pirates get updates.
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A: you should know that... i just told you.
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-1 my comment for troll BUT this sounds allot like a Donald Rumsfeld press conference:
"As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know We don't know." -Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
The guy in the article has a honda, almost not a hybrid in my book.
There are two major hybrid techs out there, the honda and the toyota types (I believe that ford's is like the toyota one, dodge's was... bad and was dropped). The 2004 toyta uses a planetary gear that hooks up the gas engine and the generator together and also to the drive train, where the electric motor hooks up to it. This all acts like a CVT and a Power Split Device (PSD) to split the gas engine's output to both the wheels and to the generator. The gas engine only needs to be on when extra power is needed (high speeds or climbing hills where it gets sent directly to the wheels via the PSD) or when the batteries are low (power get sent to the generator) or a combination of the two. The electric motor does all the low speed low HP high torque work with the gas engine shutting down quite a bit of the time.
The honda... well the honda has the gas engine as the main power and is always on (the newer civic does have a 'stop at light' mode but it rarely kicks in), the electric motor acts as supplementary to it and the whole thing goes through a normal transmission (which can be a CVT, but not the nifty PSD one that toyota uses, just a normal CVT).
The edmunds article on hybrids is misleading, check out the howstuffworks article for info on the prius
I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this... I think that it does come a bit later (does nucleus implantation in cloning count as 'conception'?).
It has been a good discussion and I have thought a bit more and refined what I think about it more, but I still think the line lies later, and is not actually a 'line' but is a transition of grays.
No matter what you do, you're never gonna get all the cars or their batteries back for proper recycling. People do strange things to cars. They end up in lakes or rivers, or abandoned in the woods.
The NiMH batteries are much better on the environment than NiCD and Lead-Acid batteries. FWIW NiMHs are not considered hazardous waste by the EPA. There is some concern about the nickel in them (nothing concrete yet) but normal car batteries have lead (bad heavy metal) and sulfuric acid... not the best things in the world. I would be more worried by the lead acid battery in a normal car than the NiMH batteries on a hybrid. Of course they can both be and should be be recycled
Aluminum is a difficult metal to work. Welding to the body to perform a collision repair is going to be expensive because it requires equipment that most body shops don't have - TIG welder, stock of aluminum sheet metal, person capable of TIG welding without warping thin sheet metal. Therefore, the cars will be scrapped more often after collisions. Also, aluminum rots extremely quickly in road and sea salt conditions - look at city buses, there's a reason all of the panels are interchangable with only 1/2 hour and a rivet gun.
More and more cars are using aluminum now, I know Audi's do so more shops will be able to deal with them.
Complexity - either real or perceived - of the drivetrain is increased. More and more people and shops will want to avoid working on them, which will drive up labor costs for service. Therefore, because they're expensive to fix, they'll get scrapped sooner.
Have you seen how the toyota hybrid works (not the honda)? It is incredible simple. It uses a planetary gear CVT/Power Split which simplifies the transmission. No torque converter or clutch and no complicated multi-speed gear boxes. Pretty nifty. Other things like generators (alternators) and electric motors (starters) already have equivalents in normal cars.
Late-Life vehicles - Will driving this car be at all practical if the assist battery is disconnected? When the car is 6-8 years old and being driven around by its last owner and the battery dies, will it still be usable as a conventional car, or will it be scrapped rather than spending the many thousands of dollars a new battery will cost?
Good question, but keep in mind that most of the old cars currently are the ones that are responsible most of the pollution, as time goes on we get new cars that run cleaner and more efficient. We also need to ask what portion of cars that are made now will be used in 6-8 years? Normal cars can need expensive repairs (new transmissions, new clutches) too and how many get junked for that? I know you keep really good care of your older car but I would have to say that is (regrettably) not what most people do.
1970 Dodge Dart 4-door sedan, mostly stock, seats 5 full-size (6 foot +) adults in comfort, modern radial tires, Slant-6 brings the thing up to highway speed quicker than most new econoboxes. And it's made of thick, solid steel. 34 years old, gets 25MPG highway, about 22MPG city.
How well will that car protect you in an accident? I know - 'it's made of thick, solid steel' - but we know all that means is that the shock and force of the impact will be directly passed on to the occupants rather than being absorbed by the crumple zones. This mean more and worse injuries to the occupants (see article). In 1970 there were 4.7 deaths per 100 million highway miles traveled, in 1999 there were 1.5. That is a nice improvement. Unless you added a catalytic converter to your 1970 car (they were introduced in '75), your Dodge Dart pollutes a lot more carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbons than cars after it with similar milage. Milage is important, but by no means the only thing.
Other than the manual transmission (Prius uses a CVT, keeps the gas engine in its 'sweep spot' all the time), you could do all that in a hybrid and theoretically improve the milage. I wonder what milage the hybrids would get if they were driven that way.
Why do you have a hard time with it? There is a fundamental difference between an unfertilized egg and a fertizilized egg.
I think I have a hard time of it because there is also a fundamental difference between an egg, an egg that is fertilized, and an egg that is fertilized and put in a uterus. Each of those three steps is required for the egg to fully develop - why draw the line after step 1? why not after step 2 (or even later, their are many other fundamental things that need to happen for the embryo to become a baby).
If they were unfertilized, then how did they manage to grow them?
As another person in this article pointed out we are arguing semantics. We can currently get human skin cells to grow in a lab but no one argues that they are human. We take a nucleus form one of those skin cells and then drop it in an egg and we now have a human being? All the information needed to make a complete human is in the nulceus of the donor cell, the egg provides the machinery to start making the totipotent stem cells.
When we are talking about less than 16 cells total (totipotent cells only exists for the first 3-4 cell divisions) I have a real hard time with considering a group of 12 cells a 'human' any more than I would consider an unfertilized egg that gets flushed out with menstruation a human. For the sake of argument (and I have not heard any one doing this research) would you consider a chimpanzee nucleus in a human egg human? A human nucleus in a chimpanzee egg human?
This only begs the question: beneficial to whom? Isn't there someone you're forgetting, someone who doesn't benefit from so-called "therapeutic" cloning, namely the unborn human being who is being harvested for parts for the benefit of others? How is this different from the Nazi-era human experimentation that we all (hopefully) abhor?
Did you RTFA or just have a knee jerk reaction? Or maybe you watched The Boys from Brazil and think that is the Nazi cloning reference? These were not even 'fertilized' cells... they were unfertilized eggs (the same ones that get flushed from the female reproductive system every month) that had the nucleus removed then replaced with the donor cell's nucleus. No sperm swimming up to nice eggs to fertilize them, the eggs don't have *any* genetic material that came from the egg donors, all they are are little cell duplication factories that duplicate the drop in genetic materiel.
All that aside, if they did not obtain the eggs in an ethical mano, then there are big concerns that need to be addressed.
Nothing to see here folks, this whole thread is over. A Nazi comparison on the second post to a/. discussion... I think this might just be a record breaking Godwin's Law post. Come to think of it, I doubt it.
Hmmm, the grandparent post gets moderated 'Interesting' for saying that the MS router works well, the parent gets moderated 'Informative' for saying the router doesn't work.
The Native American version has had a car and an e-mail program named for it, BTW.
Don't forget the city... it seemed like it was burning up when I went there last year.
The shuttle that I read about in the article was about 7 meters but was a 1/6 size prototype which works out to about 42 meter full size vehicle, 4.25 meters longer than the US shuttle.
I was not aware that the EU didn't have political BS...
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So, what's the electrolyte in NiMH, and what's the pH, in order to produce the energy density which is substantially more than a lead-acid car battery?
I'll bow to your superior expertise in this area, but this is what information I had. I have never seen a reference that lists NiMH batteries as being toxic (of course most material is not for 500v car batteries), they all list lead acid as such. NiMH use potassium hydroxide as the main electrolyte, its MSDS lists its toxicology as: Corrosive - may cause serious burns. Harmful by ingestion, inhalation and in contact with skin. If the solid or solution comes into contact with the eyes, serious eye damage may result. and the MSDS for sulfuric acid lists is as:Extremely corrosive, causes serious burns. Highly toxic. Harmful by inhalation, ingestion and through skin contact. Ingestion may be fatal. Skin contact can lead to extensive and severe burns. Chronic exposure may result in lung damage and possibly cancer. That was concentrated sulpheric acid's MSDS, I haven't hada chance to look up the concentrations of the electrolytes in the batteries.
Then again, I might be speaking out of my ass. After all, I only took two years of electrochemistry in my electrical engineering courses in University. It can't compare with the high school chemistry you obviously didn't take - or the common sense you obviously don't have - to not understand the basics of how electrical energy density must correspond to chemical energy density.
Wow, I really must have said something that pissed you off. I'm sorry that I only took AP chem in high school and neglected it in college, but what does the energy density of the battery have to do with the long term toxic effects of lead and nickel? The acids are bad in both - that is true. If Toyota was using Li-Ion/Polymer batteries I would be much less enthusiastic with them, those batteries can be positively dangerous. I won't even use them in my remote control plane because of the risks that a crash can deliver. I've seen pictures of whole SUVs totaled because of a short in a Li-Ion pack that was in the trunk, and internal short was caused by a model airplane crash and the battery exploded 5 minutes later.
Yeah, but mechanics don't like wires, in case you haven't noticed. Buy one a beer sometime and chat with him (or her). If they liked wires, they'd be electricians or electronics technicians. Mechanics generally get into the trade because they like moving parts - sorry, it sucks,
That is a weak argument against hybrids, as you said "He [mechanic roomate] has asked me into the shop to diagnose and repair dozens of electrical problems on brand-new Toyota cars when the mechanics can't fix it." Pretty much every new car has plenty of wires and electronics in them, onboard computers, airbags; gone are the days of carburetors in cars. Shoot, the easiest upgrade and tune to my car is to reprogram the ECU. If they really hate wires that much they should get into the specialty market (e.g. classic cars, offroad racing or marine engine mechanic where many of the engines don't use fuel injection, I help my friend with his sand rail, loads of fun).
Poorly maintained cars are responsible for most of the pollution; age doesn't matter. Loads of people in 3-4 year old cars are failing emissions tests because their EGR valves are stuck open, PCV valves are stuck closed, or because their timing belts have jumped a notch. The beaters tend to be driven by people who actually know how to fix them, and hear every little knock or click and know to check things out.
I'd be curious to see the actual statistics on this - most of the obvious polluters (visible particulate exhaust) I've seen on the road are older than about 15 years, but most of the cars from before 1975 or so appear in good condition, being maintained by auto enthusiasts. Anecdotal I kno
If you believe it is, fine. However, you disagree with the American justice system, and a long tradition of anglo-saxon jurisprudence. Theft is depriving someone of something. If you copy someone's song when you have no right to do so, they still have their song. What you've done is infringe on their rights to copies of that song.
Interesting view of theft...that then implies that identity theft is not theft. They still have their identity, it just has been infringed upon by someone else. Now I'm not saying my parent post was implying that music 'piracy' was not wrong but it give copyright infringement a different perspective. Right now people seem to view downloading a few songs or pirated video games in the same way they would view stealing Bill Gates identity.
Look, I never said that anybody who gets HIV deverves what they get. I'm saying that in EVERY SINGLE case, somebody is to blame even if it isn't the most recent victim. A newborn gets infected by their mother. If somebody up the chain hadn't screwed around the baby would not have been infected.
You're right on one count though. I did forget about drug addicts sharing needles, as this is effectively a blood transfer.
Okay, so now we're up to "Don't share needles. Don't screw around."
Not very compassionate. Are you using this as a way to lobby against HIV/AIDS research? If so its like lobbying against doing research for safer cars because, if there is an auto accident, someone screwed up while driving and should have been driving safer.
If not and you are lobbying for abstinence, fine that is a viewpoint but keep in mind that it goes against millions of years of evolution. It will be much easier to convince the average person to use a condom than to be abstinent. So far there are no firm results that support abstinence education as working.
The current federal sex ed statistics are mostly useless, they went from tracking number of births and proportion of participants having sex to tracking the number of participants that remain in the program, and the number 'who indicate understanding of the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from premarital sexual activity' (see Dept of Health presentation). Not really comparable. Over the last decade California had the largest drop in the nation of teenage pregnancies (now the lowest in the country) with out abstinence only education.
Don't have promiscuious sex.
Sure, maybe we should stop doing research on high blood pressure and heart disease too, after all a good diet and exercise can cure both of those.
Maybe we should also ban all religions - after all that is the root cause of terrorism.
But you'd have a hard time getting a message like that past PC liberals who seem to have taken up key positions of authority, and those tribes in Africa who believe the best way to cure aids is to have sex with a virgin. I wonder who told them that.
Ohh, nice, I really like the way you subtly linked those PC liberals with HIV infected people that have sex with virgins, really shows class and tact on your part.
Not quite true: finding the potential cures is the cheap part - doing the rest of the work (seeing if it actually works, clinical trials, FDA hoops, etc) is the really expensive part. Oh yeah, almost forgot the high expense of nebulous advertising.
We should all be expecting letters from the DOJ that we will not be able to discuss.
Well yes, it is a threat - so are the AAA maps, tourist gides and almanacs, should we regulate those, demeand photo ID with biometrics to purchase a map? (I know, the FBI and Almanacs)As an early poster pointed out we play into terrorist hands by being scared of this and limiting our information that is available.
If ever I saw a need for doing basic research before asking slashdot. I don't want to sound that snotty, but not knowing Cascades but having the Willamete and Kalamath rivers? As someone else pointed out the Cascades feed them; any casual glance at a map would have revealed that.
One would hope that this would but true (dis)believers will say any photo shown as proof of the moon landing is faked. There are people that insist the world in flat and that is alot easier to proove false.
Score one for a Robert L. Forward fan. Not the best in plot and character development but nifty science.
howdy again
I would say a nervous system would be a prerequisite for being sentient. A dozen stem cells in a lab does not have sentient thought.
Consider this scenario: a woman has a child for the specific purpose of providing a donor heart to another woman's child who is sick. Of course, the heart will not be ready until the donor child is older, let's say six years old. At that point, the donor child's heart is removed and given to the other child. Of course, this means that the donor child will die. But since it was "created specifically for this purpose" (according to your terms), it's perfectly ethical.
This is a complete straw man argument, no one here was (seriously at least) arguing that one should bring a cell to term to harvest it, in fact none of the cells were ever even implanted or got beyond a few cell divisions.
A: you shouldn't be a pirate because pirates don't get updates.
Q: i know, i implied they didn't get updates in my question, and you just repeated it to me...
A: you should know that... i just told you.
Q: see, you did it again. why are you doing that?
A: you would be better off if you knew why i was doing this.
Q: REM this is a question.
A:
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-1 my comment for troll BUT this sounds allot like a Donald Rumsfeld press conference:
"As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know We don't know." -Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
There are two major hybrid techs out there, the honda and the toyota types (I believe that ford's is like the toyota one, dodge's was... bad and was dropped). The 2004 toyta uses a planetary gear that hooks up the gas engine and the generator together and also to the drive train, where the electric motor hooks up to it. This all acts like a CVT and a Power Split Device (PSD) to split the gas engine's output to both the wheels and to the generator. The gas engine only needs to be on when extra power is needed (high speeds or climbing hills where it gets sent directly to the wheels via the PSD) or when the batteries are low (power get sent to the generator) or a combination of the two. The electric motor does all the low speed low HP high torque work with the gas engine shutting down quite a bit of the time.
The honda ... well the honda has the gas engine as the main power and is always on (the newer civic does have a 'stop at light' mode but it rarely kicks in), the electric motor acts as supplementary to it and the whole thing goes through a normal transmission (which can be a CVT, but not the nifty PSD one that toyota uses, just a normal CVT).
The edmunds article on hybrids is misleading, check out the howstuffworks article for info on the prius
It has been a good discussion and I have thought a bit more and refined what I think about it more, but I still think the line lies later, and is not actually a 'line' but is a transition of grays.
The NiMH batteries are much better on the environment than NiCD and Lead-Acid batteries. FWIW NiMHs are not considered hazardous waste by the EPA. There is some concern about the nickel in them (nothing concrete yet) but normal car batteries have lead (bad heavy metal) and sulfuric acid... not the best things in the world. I would be more worried by the lead acid battery in a normal car than the NiMH batteries on a hybrid. Of course they can both be and should be be recycled
Aluminum is a difficult metal to work. Welding to the body to perform a collision repair is going to be expensive because it requires equipment that most body shops don't have - TIG welder, stock of aluminum sheet metal, person capable of TIG welding without warping thin sheet metal. Therefore, the cars will be scrapped more often after collisions. Also, aluminum rots extremely quickly in road and sea salt conditions - look at city buses, there's a reason all of the panels are interchangable with only 1/2 hour and a rivet gun. More and more cars are using aluminum now, I know Audi's do so more shops will be able to deal with them.
Complexity - either real or perceived - of the drivetrain is increased. More and more people and shops will want to avoid working on them, which will drive up labor costs for service. Therefore, because they're expensive to fix, they'll get scrapped sooner.
Have you seen how the toyota hybrid works (not the honda)? It is incredible simple. It uses a planetary gear CVT/Power Split which simplifies the transmission. No torque converter or clutch and no complicated multi-speed gear boxes. Pretty nifty. Other things like generators (alternators) and electric motors (starters) already have equivalents in normal cars.
Late-Life vehicles - Will driving this car be at all practical if the assist battery is disconnected? When the car is 6-8 years old and being driven around by its last owner and the battery dies, will it still be usable as a conventional car, or will it be scrapped rather than spending the many thousands of dollars a new battery will cost?
Good question, but keep in mind that most of the old cars currently are the ones that are responsible most of the pollution, as time goes on we get new cars that run cleaner and more efficient. We also need to ask what portion of cars that are made now will be used in 6-8 years? Normal cars can need expensive repairs (new transmissions, new clutches) too and how many get junked for that? I know you keep really good care of your older car but I would have to say that is (regrettably) not what most people do.
1970 Dodge Dart 4-door sedan, mostly stock, seats 5 full-size (6 foot +) adults in comfort, modern radial tires, Slant-6 brings the thing up to highway speed quicker than most new econoboxes. And it's made of thick, solid steel. 34 years old, gets 25MPG highway, about 22MPG city.
How well will that car protect you in an accident? I know - 'it's made of thick, solid steel' - but we know all that means is that the shock and force of the impact will be directly passed on to the occupants rather than being absorbed by the crumple zones. This mean more and worse injuries to the occupants (see article). In 1970 there were 4.7 deaths per 100 million highway miles traveled, in 1999 there were 1.5. That is a nice improvement. Unless you added a catalytic converter to your 1970 car (they were introduced in '75), your Dodge Dart pollutes a lot more carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbons than cars after it with similar milage. Milage is important, but by no means the only thing.
Other than the manual transmission (Prius uses a CVT, keeps the gas engine in its 'sweep spot' all the time), you could do all that in a hybrid and theoretically improve the milage. I wonder what milage the hybrids would get if they were driven that way.
I think I have a hard time of it because there is also a fundamental difference between an egg, an egg that is fertilized, and an egg that is fertilized and put in a uterus. Each of those three steps is required for the egg to fully develop - why draw the line after step 1? why not after step 2 (or even later, their are many other fundamental things that need to happen for the embryo to become a baby).
As another person in this article pointed out we are arguing semantics. We can currently get human skin cells to grow in a lab but no one argues that they are human. We take a nucleus form one of those skin cells and then drop it in an egg and we now have a human being? All the information needed to make a complete human is in the nulceus of the donor cell, the egg provides the machinery to start making the totipotent stem cells.
When we are talking about less than 16 cells total (totipotent cells only exists for the first 3-4 cell divisions) I have a real hard time with considering a group of 12 cells a 'human' any more than I would consider an unfertilized egg that gets flushed out with menstruation a human. For the sake of argument (and I have not heard any one doing this research) would you consider a chimpanzee nucleus in a human egg human? A human nucleus in a chimpanzee egg human?
Did you RTFA or just have a knee jerk reaction? Or maybe you watched The Boys from Brazil and think that is the Nazi cloning reference? These were not even 'fertilized' cells... they were unfertilized eggs (the same ones that get flushed from the female reproductive system every month) that had the nucleus removed then replaced with the donor cell's nucleus. No sperm swimming up to nice eggs to fertilize them, the eggs don't have *any* genetic material that came from the egg donors, all they are are little cell duplication factories that duplicate the drop in genetic materiel.
All that aside, if they did not obtain the eggs in an ethical mano, then there are big concerns that need to be addressed.
Nothing to see here folks, this whole thread is over. A Nazi comparison on the second post to a /. discussion... I think this might just be a record breaking Godwin's Law post. Come to think of it, I doubt it.
Hmmm, the grandparent post gets moderated 'Interesting' for saying that the MS router works well, the parent gets moderated 'Informative' for saying the router doesn't work.
The Native American version has had a car and an e-mail program named for it, BTW. Don't forget the city... it seemed like it was burning up when I went there last year.
I was not aware that the EU didn't have political BS...