If price of the electric car > Price of cheap gas fueled car + 200,000 miles of gasoline then don't buy
You missed the point of this. They weren't comparing this electric car to a Geo or something. They compared it to a Porsche and a BMW, and it kicked their A$$...
The real point is that a gasoline powered sports car has trouble competing with this electric car. So let me know when Porsche comes up with something that can compete with this on performance...
I guarantee you I can buy a mustang or camaro from the dealer with enough manufacture offered go-fast options that'll kick a BMW or Porsche's A$$ for tens of thousands less but that doesn't mean I would want a Ford or Chevy over a BMW or Porsche because at the end of the day you're still just driving a Chevy or Ford. Tesla is an unknown name, it doesn't impress like BMW or Porsche.
Are you sure a 15 mile range would be all that useful?
Yes, I sure am. It's about 2 miles to work; major challenges here are deep cold starting / operating and various other weather factors. Rain, snow, high wind. Definitely need transport, and it definitely needs to be a closed cabin car, it definitely needs to be able to reach highway speeds, but range isn't much of an issue. Even the model S doesn't have enough range to make it to the nearest city in my state, which is 300 miles away. Not a common use case by any means, but it is mine.
As for the price w/5k pack, I was kidding. Hence the smiley.
15 mile probably wouldn't sell, but 50 miles would, and they could always sell additional battery packs to increase the range, maybe lift a panel in the trunk and snap in a $500 pack and get another 5 miles? But 50 miles is about what the Volt gets before gas kicks in and it's still $40,000+ so even that's not low enough to reach that $20,000 sweet spot.
Are you sure a 15 mile range would be all that useful?
The cost of the battery pack is probably at least $10k, but that's not enough to get the thing down to $20k.
The good news (for Tesla) is that it doesn't really matter for this particular car. It's competing in the luxury sports sedan market, where the $70k Model S is actually priced about the same as the gasoline-powered competition of that class. That's a big factor in why automag gave it the "car of the year", because it's a better car at the same price.
If you're choosing Mercedes E-550 for $75k or the Tesla Model S for $70k, and the Model S is considered to be a better car, the price isn't really a factor in that decision. Inconvenience of recharging might be, but the fact that the range on this thing is comparable to a gasoline car means it's fine except for long trips that don't have a supercharge station in the path you want to drive. That should be at least partially resolved in a year or two, once the Supercharge network covers most important routes in the US and Canada.
But you can't just say "I'm gonna make a luxury car and price it a little lower than well known luxury cars and make tons of $$$!" People buying $78,000 cars are buying the brand name as much as they are buying the luxury. You wouldn't pay $78,000 for a Kia no matter how much luxury it had, and Tesla is worse than Kia because Tesla has no reputation. A no-name startup appears and wants to price their cars like high end Benz, BMW and Porsche? Good luck with that. Even if it does sell, you're talking about a high end market that sells thousands of those types of cars a year, vs millions of Camrys and Tauruses sold yearly. And Americans still don't buy cars, we buy SUVs, even Porsche's highest selling vehicle is the Cayenne SUV. Tesla is doing everything wrong, it's almost like they're trying to fail.
It would probably be cheaper to just rent a petrol car when you need one, rather than store and maintain one yourself.
This. A few hundred dollars should allow you to rent most gasoline vehicles for at least a week, which is probably less then just one year of insurance, taxes and/or registration. But nothing beats the convenience of having a 2nd vehicle ready to go 24/7, so I can't blame someone for keeping a ten yr old Accord or 4runner around.
If these can be had at $399 a month then that needs to be emphasized in every review just like they mention the $7,000 tax incentive. They're not going to get anyone to look twice at this thing when they throw out numbers typical of Porsche price tags and look at how many of those you see daily. "Faster than BLANK" is nice, but it should be for $78,000, and your average american is concerned about monthly price more than 0-60. They need an everyman car if they expect to survive, something sexier than the Nissan Leaf but priced like a Camry or Taurus. And automobile always chooses silly concept-type cars as car of the year, last year it was the Chevy Volt.
Sadly I would probably vote for the later, Apple has been sticking the letter "i" in front of common words since the iPod and yes I know iMac came first but outside of networking geeks Mac is an Apple word, not a common everyday noun like pod and pad and phone, so I'm sure their argument came down to "Hey sticking the "i" on front of common words is OUR thing!" while ignoring that just because you are the current 800 pound gorilla doesn't mean you can co-op any copyright anywhere that has the letter "i" in front of a common term.
You forgot iBook from 1999, which is a common noun, and im sure there are more from beforw 2003 when these trolls registered iFone. Apple came out with a line of products with a common naming structure and did tons of marketing so everyone knows iName means Apple. Then others tried to copy that naming. Most lost, but somehow these trolls fooled "mexico's legal system"
Apple's lawyers either didn't do the research here, or are arrogant to the point of being harmful to their interests.
Didn't apple use iDevice long before 2003? iMac? iPod? iBook? Its clear this iFone company was ripping off apple's iDevice naming convention, I don't understand why apple lost. If I had registered iEverything before 2009, would I be the rightful owner or a troll?
So.... it's Tetris on a circuit board.... and he extended the wires for the LEDs and drilled holes in a pumpkin for the LEDs to shine through?
Maybe I'm missing something..... why is this interesting?
I understand playing tetris on a skyscraper, because A) it's a skyscraper B) getting the rooms to light up on queue is difficult, but this is just LEDs, it's just... normal tetris... but LOOK! It's in a Pumpkin!
Could be the other vessels were busy with other boats, or maybe they didn't know the engine was bad until it was too late to call other vessels for help since I'm sure they were all heading out to sea too
According to the article we're already too late: "According to astronomical observations, this 27-gigaton rock may come close to Earth in 2029....From his calculations, Paek estimates that it would take up to 20 years for the cumulative effect of solar radiation pressure to successfully pull the asteroid off its Earthbound trajectory. "
2029 - 20 = 2009, so we're too late.
I still don't understand why the sun's photons are better at shoving a asteroid off-course than a rocket, but i guess if Star Trek used photon torpedoes they must be pretty good
Aliens would sure think we're strange: "Why.... WTF.... did they PAINT that asteroid?!?"
True, but with the android phones everything is tied so closely to google it's difficult to setup anything else. You must have a gmail account to login to an android phone, which then pulls your YouTube and google+ as well. I like google but I don't like handing them everything I have ever done online.
I noticed wonky google search results the other day when looking for iPhone apps every search kept coming up with android apps high in the results.
I work in Sattelite Communications and we use these algorithims by default. We call it forward error correction. I would assume that they would use a much less aggressive algorithim, maby 1 correction bit per 8-16 bits rather than a 1 for 1 data, or a 1 for 2 data that you see for dirty links in the space operations. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viterbi_algorithm or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_correction.
The additional throughput is not from compression but from not having to TCP resend entire packets and probably also prevents the TCP window from resetting.
But.... TCP/IP already has parity bits, so how is this different? this is still sending an extra something so the math can be done to figure out the missing data, sounds like the same thing we've been doing for ages...
*nod* I will agree that there have been results here which have been ridiculous. And I also think that there is bias because I'm not in Italy and don't hear reports of the cases which are not ridiculous.
But still, the Amanda Knox thing, this case... It's completely over-the-top ridiculous. They have to get her on something now because she's been accused. Even if it's lying about who was guilty. And of course, any mistreatment by anybody in authority didn't happen, and she's guilty of something for saying it did.
It's.... utterly insane.
Here we have things like the OJ trial or the Trayven Martin case that are circus-like. But, nowhere near the levels of insanity. I'm sorry. They just aren't.
When the US does stuff it's our own people, not tourist like Amanda Knox or scientists
They didn't build a plane either. They built a radio controlled airplane.
If someone says I built a plane or car or house, I don't think they mean a scale model. The rc plane the spent 80 hours and $2,000+ building could have been bought for a few hundred bucks.
This press release is complete garbage and I'm disappointed this is on/.
I can see people possibly being confused by this, but these are the same people who are generally confused by everything involving choices in a computing environment.
The summary makes it sound like yet another conspiracy...
I have to disagree:
1). Windows 8 and windows rt look identical, both with tiles and touchscreens
2). Both designed for tablets
3). Both released around the same time
windows rt devices are cheaper though, so when consumers go into a store and see two tablets sitting side by side that look identical running windows, they're gonna grab RT, take it home, and be furious when they can't install any windows software on it, only software designed for Windows RT will work. I see this as a epic fail for Microsoft, biggest fail since windows ME. I do not understand why Microsoft made two identical OSes for tablets, they would have been better focusing on windows 8
Only good thing though is these RT devices will quickly be sold at fire sale and maybe we can put Android on them;)
We can make the kids parents pay for pills to almost fix the problem.
Instead of actually fixing the problems which might be expensive and take a long time.
Cheap easy short term gains are awesome! Lets build an entire country like that!
I think you missed the description: "....said Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, an expert in prescription drug use among low-income children."
low-income probably meaning welfare section 8 food stamps. The parents can't afford a roof for themselves or their children, much less pills.
I say, whatever works. If pills make these kids stay in school and out of jail off welfare and section 8 there's nothing wrong with that, and the pills are probably cheaper.
Positives:
1) More productive life for individual
2) Tax pay less
Negatives:
1) Possible pill addict for life
Positives outweigh negatives. If there is a magic be-more-successful pill, sign me up too.
Yes, one must be careful, but I would still say that internet access is a right or is quickly moving toward becoming one
When living your life often requires internet access, then it becomes a right. If everyone had provided the non-internet equivalent of the daily services, then maybe it would be a luxury
I don't think you were completely trying to make the point that "EV still has to be plugged in to a fossil-fuel plant, so they're no better than gas", but I've heard it made so many times that I get stabby when I see something like it.
And let's not forget the hassle. Every time you park you have to plug in the Leaf. Every. Single. Time. You know how annoying it is to have a cellphone battery only last until noon? Multiply that by 100x. And god forbid there not be a garage to park in and have to run around in the rain plugging in the car. Not fun.
Electric just doesn't make economical sense yet. Maybe if gas was $7 a gallon.... no, still not, $2,640 vs $14,000 for 70,000 miles, you'd have to drive almost 150,000 miles to break even considering the $20,000 price difference between a Focus and Leaf, and you'd still have to deal with the hassle of charging the Leaf all the time for 150,000 miles.
But if gas prices triple in 15 years like they have in the past 15 years I could see electric being the solution, especially if the vehicles get a better range and become more efficient, but that's assuming cars will still be 35mpg and electricity prices remain 11 cents per kwh.
I recently rented a 2012 focus, and even though I "drove it like a rental" I still got 33mpg. Think if I drove it daily I would easily get 40+. Also mpg is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Average person won't drive more than 100 miles a day, now you just have to figure out how much to pay for that 100 miles. 50mpg is only 2 gallons for 100 miles, but that's going to be a slow small expensive hybrid. 33mpg is 3 gallons and still slow and small but a cheaper vehicle like a ford focus. 25mpg is 4 gallons but that's a larger vehicle and its easy to find a used, vehicle that gets real world 25mpg. The difference between 50mpg and 33mpg is 1 gallon a day so if monthly payment for 50mpg vehicle costs more than whatever 30 gallons of gas costs in your area then you might as well stick with 33mpg vehicle. Electricity is not the answer, people act like electric vehicles cost nothing to run since they don't use gas but they still cost over $1 in electricity to travel 20 miles and US grid can not keep up if everyone started charging their cars. We need more efficient solar so we can stop building nuclear plants and burning coal.
so the iphone has gone from single core to dual core, over 5x faster according to geekbench and a larger screen, all while maintaining the same or better battery life according to Apple? That sounds like a success to me.
No, each generation of smart phones has shorter battery life because they put bigger brighter screens on them and are connecting to higher-speed networks that require faster processing or more hardware to encode and decode the data. Display power dominates most smartphones and is closely followed by general processing power when used as a web appliance rather than as a phone.
*worse* battery life? Seems to me smartphones are getting better. Sure the screens get larger, but I'm getting much longer battery life from a modern smartphone than I would from a Pocket PC from 2003.
But they leave off the ones that have actually been realized. Communicators the size of a lapel pin were wild conjecture at the time of the original series. Automatic doors were a new idea. I'm sure there are other examples of 'Star Trek Tech' that we completely and utterly take for granted today.
I hate these articles, someone makes one every year and they always stretch what we have to try and fit star trek. Yes, we have cellphones and bluetooth and ipads, so we're doing pretty good at catching up.
I'm more interested in what we have that star trek didn't have. Tiny wireless cameras? We have that, star trek didn't, and how useful would that be instead of "Data what do you see? Data? Hello? Someone? Are you guys getting killed over there?"
Or GPS? They had no idea where people were.
Wireless heartrate monitors? We have that, they didn't.... well, I think the medical bay had something they would use, so the doctor could monitor you if you were very sick, but how useful would it be on away missions to check heartrate to tell when someone's nervous or scared? So many more uses they didn't touch.
Not $3000, $426. 300 x $1.42 average. Very slight difference-- goes from "maybe economically viable" to "OK as a hobby, not as a means of support".
Some areas of the world $426 in a week is decent money, even for a programmer, especially if he was able to do this from home, so I wouldn't knock it. I'm sure there's people that even look at that $3,000 like it's nothing and wouldn't work a week for that let alone a few weeks.
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If price of the electric car > Price of cheap gas fueled car + 200,000 miles of gasoline then don't buy
You missed the point of this. They weren't comparing this electric car to a Geo or something. They compared it to a Porsche and a BMW, and it kicked their A$$...
The real point is that a gasoline powered sports car has trouble competing with this electric car. So let me know when Porsche comes up with something that can compete with this on performance...
I guarantee you I can buy a mustang or camaro from the dealer with enough manufacture offered go-fast options that'll kick a BMW or Porsche's A$$ for tens of thousands less but that doesn't mean I would want a Ford or Chevy over a BMW or Porsche because at the end of the day you're still just driving a Chevy or Ford. Tesla is an unknown name, it doesn't impress like BMW or Porsche.
Yes, I sure am. It's about 2 miles to work; major challenges here are deep cold starting / operating and various other weather factors. Rain, snow, high wind. Definitely need transport, and it definitely needs to be a closed cabin car, it definitely needs to be able to reach highway speeds, but range isn't much of an issue. Even the model S doesn't have enough range to make it to the nearest city in my state, which is 300 miles away. Not a common use case by any means, but it is mine.
As for the price w/5k pack, I was kidding. Hence the smiley.
15 mile probably wouldn't sell, but 50 miles would, and they could always sell additional battery packs to increase the range, maybe lift a panel in the trunk and snap in a $500 pack and get another 5 miles? But 50 miles is about what the Volt gets before gas kicks in and it's still $40,000+ so even that's not low enough to reach that $20,000 sweet spot.
Are you sure a 15 mile range would be all that useful?
The cost of the battery pack is probably at least $10k, but that's not enough to get the thing down to $20k.
The good news (for Tesla) is that it doesn't really matter for this particular car. It's competing in the luxury sports sedan market, where the $70k Model S is actually priced about the same as the gasoline-powered competition of that class. That's a big factor in why automag gave it the "car of the year", because it's a better car at the same price.
If you're choosing Mercedes E-550 for $75k or the Tesla Model S for $70k, and the Model S is considered to be a better car, the price isn't really a factor in that decision. Inconvenience of recharging might be, but the fact that the range on this thing is comparable to a gasoline car means it's fine except for long trips that don't have a supercharge station in the path you want to drive. That should be at least partially resolved in a year or two, once the Supercharge network covers most important routes in the US and Canada.
But you can't just say "I'm gonna make a luxury car and price it a little lower than well known luxury cars and make tons of $$$!" People buying $78,000 cars are buying the brand name as much as they are buying the luxury. You wouldn't pay $78,000 for a Kia no matter how much luxury it had, and Tesla is worse than Kia because Tesla has no reputation. A no-name startup appears and wants to price their cars like high end Benz, BMW and Porsche? Good luck with that. Even if it does sell, you're talking about a high end market that sells thousands of those types of cars a year, vs millions of Camrys and Tauruses sold yearly. And Americans still don't buy cars, we buy SUVs, even Porsche's highest selling vehicle is the Cayenne SUV. Tesla is doing everything wrong, it's almost like they're trying to fail.
It would probably be cheaper to just rent a petrol car when you need one, rather than store and maintain one yourself.
This. A few hundred dollars should allow you to rent most gasoline vehicles for at least a week, which is probably less then just one year of insurance, taxes and/or registration. But nothing beats the convenience of having a 2nd vehicle ready to go 24/7, so I can't blame someone for keeping a ten yr old Accord or 4runner around.
If these can be had at $399 a month then that needs to be emphasized in every review just like they mention the $7,000 tax incentive. They're not going to get anyone to look twice at this thing when they throw out numbers typical of Porsche price tags and look at how many of those you see daily. "Faster than BLANK" is nice, but it should be for $78,000, and your average american is concerned about monthly price more than 0-60. They need an everyman car if they expect to survive, something sexier than the Nissan Leaf but priced like a Camry or Taurus. And automobile always chooses silly concept-type cars as car of the year, last year it was the Chevy Volt.
Sadly I would probably vote for the later, Apple has been sticking the letter "i" in front of common words since the iPod and yes I know iMac came first but outside of networking geeks Mac is an Apple word, not a common everyday noun like pod and pad and phone, so I'm sure their argument came down to "Hey sticking the "i" on front of common words is OUR thing!" while ignoring that just because you are the current 800 pound gorilla doesn't mean you can co-op any copyright anywhere that has the letter "i" in front of a common term.
But then again this is the same company that tried to sue not one but two companies for daring to have an Apple for a logo even though their Apple logos were nothing like Apple's nor was their businesses in any way comparable to Apple, so why am I not surprised?
You forgot iBook from 1999, which is a common noun, and im sure there are more from beforw 2003 when these trolls registered iFone. Apple came out with a line of products with a common naming structure and did tons of marketing so everyone knows iName means Apple. Then others tried to copy that naming. Most lost, but somehow these trolls fooled "mexico's legal system"
Apple's lawyers either didn't do the research here, or are arrogant to the point of being harmful to their interests.
Didn't apple use iDevice long before 2003? iMac? iPod? iBook? Its clear this iFone company was ripping off apple's iDevice naming convention, I don't understand why apple lost. If I had registered iEverything before 2009, would I be the rightful owner or a troll?
So.... it's Tetris on a circuit board.... and he extended the wires for the LEDs and drilled holes in a pumpkin for the LEDs to shine through?
Maybe I'm missing something..... why is this interesting?
I understand playing tetris on a skyscraper, because A) it's a skyscraper B) getting the rooms to light up on queue is difficult, but this is just LEDs, it's just... normal tetris... but LOOK! It's in a Pumpkin!
Can someone explain why this is interesting?
I have no way of getting on the internet.
*SMACK*
Low-flying "whoosh" misjudged its height and hit you in the face instead?
Hurricane redirected the whoosh
Could be the other vessels were busy with other boats, or maybe they didn't know the engine was bad until it was too late to call other vessels for help since I'm sure they were all heading out to sea too
first or second order accurate.
According to the article we're already too late:
"According to astronomical observations, this 27-gigaton rock may come close to Earth in 2029....From his calculations, Paek estimates that it would take up to 20 years for the cumulative effect of solar radiation pressure to successfully pull the asteroid off its Earthbound trajectory. "
2029 - 20 = 2009, so we're too late.
I still don't understand why the sun's photons are better at shoving a asteroid off-course than a rocket, but i guess if Star Trek used photon torpedoes they must be pretty good
Aliens would sure think we're strange: "Why.... WTF.... did they PAINT that asteroid?!?"
True, but with the android phones everything is tied so closely to google it's difficult to setup anything else. You must have a gmail account to login to an android phone, which then pulls your YouTube and google+ as well. I like google but I don't like handing them everything I have ever done online.
I noticed wonky google search results the other day when looking for iPhone apps every search kept coming up with android apps high in the results.
I work in Sattelite Communications and we use these algorithims by default. We call it forward error correction. I would assume that they would use a much less aggressive algorithim, maby 1 correction bit per 8-16 bits rather than a 1 for 1 data, or a 1 for 2 data that you see for dirty links in the space operations. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viterbi_algorithm or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_correction. The additional throughput is not from compression but from not having to TCP resend entire packets and probably also prevents the TCP window from resetting.
But.... TCP/IP already has parity bits, so how is this different? this is still sending an extra something so the math can be done to figure out the missing data, sounds like the same thing we've been doing for ages...
*nod* I will agree that there have been results here which have been ridiculous. And I also think that there is bias because I'm not in Italy and don't hear reports of the cases which are not ridiculous.
But still, the Amanda Knox thing, this case... It's completely over-the-top ridiculous. They have to get her on something now because she's been accused. Even if it's lying about who was guilty. And of course, any mistreatment by anybody in authority didn't happen, and she's guilty of something for saying it did.
It's.... utterly insane.
Here we have things like the OJ trial or the Trayven Martin case that are circus-like. But, nowhere near the levels of insanity. I'm sorry. They just aren't.
When the US does stuff it's our own people, not tourist like Amanda Knox or scientists
The press release is deceptive.
They didn't build a plane either. They built a radio controlled airplane.
/.
If someone says I built a plane or car or house, I don't think they mean a scale model. The rc plane the spent 80 hours and $2,000+ building could have been bought for a few hundred bucks.
This press release is complete garbage and I'm disappointed this is on
I can see people possibly being confused by this, but these are the same people who are generally confused by everything involving choices in a computing environment.
The summary makes it sound like yet another conspiracy...
I have to disagree:
;)
1). Windows 8 and windows rt look identical, both with tiles and touchscreens
2). Both designed for tablets
3). Both released around the same time
windows rt devices are cheaper though, so when consumers go into a store and see two tablets sitting side by side that look identical running windows, they're gonna grab RT, take it home, and be furious when they can't install any windows software on it, only software designed for Windows RT will work. I see this as a epic fail for Microsoft, biggest fail since windows ME. I do not understand why Microsoft made two identical OSes for tablets, they would have been better focusing on windows 8
Only good thing though is these RT devices will quickly be sold at fire sale and maybe we can put Android on them
We can make the kids parents pay for pills to almost fix the problem.
Instead of actually fixing the problems which might be expensive and take a long time.
Cheap easy short term gains are awesome! Lets build an entire country like that!
I think you missed the description: "....said Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, an expert in prescription drug use among low-income children."
low-income probably meaning welfare section 8 food stamps. The parents can't afford a roof for themselves or their children, much less pills.
I say, whatever works. If pills make these kids stay in school and out of jail off welfare and section 8 there's nothing wrong with that, and the pills are probably cheaper.
Positives:
1) More productive life for individual
2) Tax pay less
Negatives:
1) Possible pill addict for life
Positives outweigh negatives. If there is a magic be-more-successful pill, sign me up too.
Yes, one must be careful, but I would still say that internet access is a right or is quickly moving toward becoming one
When living your life often requires internet access, then it becomes a right. If everyone had provided the non-internet equivalent of the daily services, then maybe it would be a luxury
It's a right. The US Govt already provides free cellphones to low-income consumers. Phone service in the US is no longer a luxury, it is a right. Mobile broadband should be the same way.
I don't think you were completely trying to make the point that "EV still has to be plugged in to a fossil-fuel plant, so they're no better than gas", but I've heard it made so many times that I get stabby when I see something like it.
My issue is people act like electric cars cost nothing to run, and that's not true. I pay almost 11 cents a kwh. Nissan Leaf has a 24 kwh battery. So it'll cost me $2.64 in electricity for a full battery. The range varies from 47 miles to 138 miles, but 70 seems about average, so let's assume $2.64 for 70 miles.
Judging from my experiences with the 2012 Ford Focus it should easily average 35mpg. Gas at $3.50/gal, that's $7 per 70 miles.
So the Leaf is much cheaper to operate, 70,000 miles in a Leaf would cost $2,640 compare to $7,000 from a Focus. But the Nissan Leaf is a $36,000 car compared to the $15,000 Ford Focus. $20,000 would buy A LOT of gasoline. Also figure the Leaf will need a special $2,200 home charger unless you want to wait 12 hours for the car to charge on 120v.
And let's not forget the hassle. Every time you park you have to plug in the Leaf. Every. Single. Time. You know how annoying it is to have a cellphone battery only last until noon? Multiply that by 100x. And god forbid there not be a garage to park in and have to run around in the rain plugging in the car. Not fun.
Electric just doesn't make economical sense yet. Maybe if gas was $7 a gallon.... no, still not, $2,640 vs $14,000 for 70,000 miles, you'd have to drive almost 150,000 miles to break even considering the $20,000 price difference between a Focus and Leaf, and you'd still have to deal with the hassle of charging the Leaf all the time for 150,000 miles.
But if gas prices triple in 15 years like they have in the past 15 years I could see electric being the solution, especially if the vehicles get a better range and become more efficient, but that's assuming cars will still be 35mpg and electricity prices remain 11 cents per kwh.
I recently rented a 2012 focus, and even though I "drove it like a rental" I still got 33mpg. Think if I drove it daily I would easily get 40+. Also mpg is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Average person won't drive more than 100 miles a day, now you just have to figure out how much to pay for that 100 miles. 50mpg is only 2 gallons for 100 miles, but that's going to be a slow small expensive hybrid. 33mpg is 3 gallons and still slow and small but a cheaper vehicle like a ford focus. 25mpg is 4 gallons but that's a larger vehicle and its easy to find a used, vehicle that gets real world 25mpg. The difference between 50mpg and 33mpg is 1 gallon a day so if monthly payment for 50mpg vehicle costs more than whatever 30 gallons of gas costs in your area then you might as well stick with 33mpg vehicle. Electricity is not the answer, people act like electric vehicles cost nothing to run since they don't use gas but they still cost over $1 in electricity to travel 20 miles and US grid can not keep up if everyone started charging their cars. We need more efficient solar so we can stop building nuclear plants and burning coal.
so the iphone has gone from single core to dual core, over 5x faster according to geekbench and a larger screen, all while maintaining the same or better battery life according to Apple? That sounds like a success to me.
No, each generation of smart phones has shorter battery life because they put bigger brighter screens on them and are connecting to higher-speed networks that require faster processing or more hardware to encode and decode the data. Display power dominates most smartphones and is closely followed by general processing power when used as a web appliance rather than as a phone.
*worse* battery life? Seems to me smartphones are getting better. Sure the screens get larger, but I'm getting much longer battery life from a modern smartphone than I would from a Pocket PC from 2003.
But they leave off the ones that have actually been realized. Communicators the size of a lapel pin were wild conjecture at the time of the original series. Automatic doors were a new idea. I'm sure there are other examples of 'Star Trek Tech' that we completely and utterly take for granted today.
I hate these articles, someone makes one every year and they always stretch what we have to try and fit star trek. Yes, we have cellphones and bluetooth and ipads, so we're doing pretty good at catching up.
I'm more interested in what we have that star trek didn't have. Tiny wireless cameras? We have that, star trek didn't, and how useful would that be instead of "Data what do you see? Data? Hello? Someone? Are you guys getting killed over there?"
Or GPS? They had no idea where people were.
Wireless heartrate monitors? We have that, they didn't.... well, I think the medical bay had something they would use, so the doctor could monitor you if you were very sick, but how useful would it be on away missions to check heartrate to tell when someone's nervous or scared? So many more uses they didn't touch.
Not $3000, $426. 300 x $1.42 average. Very slight difference-- goes from "maybe economically viable" to "OK as a hobby, not as a means of support".
Some areas of the world $426 in a week is decent money, even for a programmer, especially if he was able to do this from home, so I wouldn't knock it. I'm sure there's people that even look at that $3,000 like it's nothing and wouldn't work a week for that let alone a few weeks.
Ah, because developers have flocked to Apple's hardware and design, other phone manufactures are forced to steal Apple's design.... wait what?