At the moment there are no hydrogen refueling stations near most of the U.S. population. And when I just checked the California station finder map a significant fraction were "offline." On the other hand, almost everyone who can buy a new car also has electricity at their house. Our Tesla charges overnight at home - with nearly zero extra time taken beyond parking the car. Even if a fuel cell car fills faster, if I have to drive somewhere to fill it the time it takes out of my day is greater. Tesla's supercharger network is already good, and getting better. Long trips are now pretty painless (as long as you are traveling on major route that has stations) Perfect? Certainly not. But it is getting better, and so-called destination charging spots are being added even faster than supercharger locations. Tesla made the smart choice to put a 10KW charger onboard every car. So all a destination (hotel, resort, all-day attraction) needs to install is a simple 50A 240V outlet, of a type that is already the de facto standard at RV parks. No expensive charger to buy and maintain for the destination owner. Just a low cost plug that should work virtually forever once installed. It is going to be a lot harder to build out a nationwide network of hydrogen stations.
First sensible post in this topic. At even a mile away hand shake is going to be dancing the beam around a huge area, and it is going to be pretty spread out unless it is something with a large lens and not a handheld laser. (Look up "diffraction limited" if that means nothing to you.) I have a hard time reconciling pilots reports of having their sight "dazzled" or even damaged, with how little power, and for how little time, the beam could have been entering their eye.
It is not the problem you think it is. It is easy and fairly cheap to make a narrow band-stop optical filter. http://www.omegafilters.com/ca... Knocking out a few narrow bands has little effect on the way the world looks.
Most UPS's are "pass through" devices that connect the incoming power directly to the output if the input has power. When the input power drops, a relay inside the ups switches the outlets to an inverter that is powered by a battery. They provide no protection against surges, other than the same kind of limited protection that a powerstrip with surge protection has.
There are "online" UPS's that do a full double conversation (AC->DC->AC) at all times. They are heavy and expensive, but do provide nearly perfect protection to the attached gear.
If I had mod points I would mod this up - most sensible post in this thread so far. So called surge suppressors are only useful to minimize the amplitude of very short, very high voltage but low total energy transients of the kind created by lightning (nearby, not a direct his) and other arc like events, such as sparks created by connecting and disconnecting loads.
If you are somewhere third world, and the nominal 220V line goes to 260V and stays there for a while (fractions of a second to many seconds) the kind of surge suppressor found in power strips is useless. Your adapter will probably fry - and with luck fail in a way that blows a fuse inside without sending any damaging over voltage to the device it is powering. Better quality power adapters have added parts on the output that clamp the DC to safe limits even if the upstream parts in the adapter are being overvoltaged to failure.
So use good quality (expensive brand name) adapters and take extras. They may die, but should sacrifice themselves to save the attached gear.
PS - I spent years in industry designing power distribution, regulation and filtering gear for pro audio - including equipment designed for touring sound that had to run from generators that would sometimes put out excess voltage for a relatively long time if too much load was shed suddenly.
Except we have substantial oil resources (and our no-so-liberal governor has had no interest in killing fracking), some of the largest agricultural exports of high value crops in the world, a budget surplus and a growing rainy day fund, silicon valley, world leading genetic engineering companies, a huge aerospace and defense industry, and universities like Stanford, Cal Tech, the whole UC system etc.
Has anyone done a recent analysis of where these machines are, and what version of Windows they are running? XP use is finally fading, and I have seen a surprising number of home PCs successfully upgraded from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10. I would not expect a malware infection to survive the update. So are the number of bots in the network declining?
I just signed up for 365 for business. I supposedly get a 1 TB OneDrive account with it. Sounds great, until you try to use it. I have a pretty solid business cable modem internet account. Reliably 50/10 mb/s. Three days ago I dropped an existing folder that had about 60 GB of content in roughly 36,000 files into the OneDrive folder on my desktop PC. As of this moment, less that 50% has synced to the cloud, after more than 72 hours. Files are uploading at about 350kb/s at best, with lots of pauses.. There are no preferences in the OneDrive client that allow me to tell it to go ahead and use more bandwidth. Upload rates to my Google Drive on the same computer can saturate my local upstream, 30 times faster than OneDrive. So I was searching on "slow OneDrive" and found that the very slow upload is universal - and universally despised. The same searches also revealed something that is not at all clear when you sign up for Office 365: there is a hard limit of 20,000 objects (files+folders). For my files, with an average size of about 1.7 MB, the maximum I can store is 34 GB, about 3% of the advertised terabyte. I feel cheated... And I now know the folder I wanted to upload has too many items. I'm not sure what I am going to do. The whole point of the OneDrive was to make a complete set of some business files on my desktop available to my laptop while traveling. Yes, I know lots of other ways to do this, but since I wanted the Office 365 account for mail hosting in any case, the OneDrive space was a nice bonus. Except it is not really usable at all, and that is very frustrating.
I think you are the one failing to fully think through the math as it applies to this issue. It takes decades for a reduction in birthrate to cause an actual drop in population. Age of first birth and number of births per woman both have an effect, but given that at any given time there are 3-5 generations of people alive, a drop in the birthrate among young females only slows the rate of growth a little at first. When their children in turn start to have children, if that generation maintains a low birthrate, the rate of grown will decline more - but will still probably be a positive absolute increase. Going out to the grandchild generation, if that third generation maintains a low birthrate, the population will actually start to shrink, as the grandparents and great grandparents start to die at a rate that is higher than the birthrate.
Every child born, assuming he/she is educated and given the opportunity to work has the possibility to add more to the total wealth than they cost. I say every woman should be required to have 3 children to make sure that there are plenty of young workers to keep the economy going when I am old and retired. Who says they have the right to shirk that duty?
In fact the one child policy was intended to create gradual drop. Because of the large number of young people already born 30 years ago, who may just now be having their first child, while they and their parents are still alive, the population is still growing, and will continue to grow for many more years. If I recall correctly, the most optimistic projections, assuming widespread and nearly perfect compliance with one child per mother, had the population leveling off in about the year 2050/
This is a useful form factor for some niche applications. The Quantum Byte is a bit more money, but has ethernet, and the I/O ports are all built in - no dock. No battery either. I've used two of these: one sitting in a closet running the client software of a cloud based backup service. The tiny PC backs up the NAS it is sitting next to. I put VNC on the little PC and run it without any attached peripherals at all. The other one is sitting in the server room of a larger business and is connected to the systems there as an alternate way to access them that does not depend on the servers being up. As others have mentioned it would also serve as a fine little media PC. I could see my parents using it as a full on home computer that was dead quiet, booted nearly instantly, and runs full versions of desktop apps. They have, and like, tablets for casual web browsing, but sometimes they want a big screen and a regular keyboard.
You don't understand because you are not fully informed. Solar production peaks at noon. Electricity demand peaks much later - it varies by time of year and location, but it is never so early as noon. I have time of day metering at my house. In the summer, peak rates are 1PM to 7PM. In the winter, peak rates are 5 to 8 PM. I send the most power to the grid from my solar panels at a non-optimal time. If I could shift when I send that power to the peak demand time I would get paid more, and the power company would not need to fire up their relatively dirty and inefficient gas turbines so much in the evening.
Your answer is interesting mix mostly correct and subtly (but really) wrong.
In most modern US houses the kitchen has 20 amp circuits, but the the standard US plug and outlet (with parallel blades) is only rated at 15 amps.Worse yet, UL and similar safety agencies will not pass (certify) an appliance that draws a continuous load of more than 85% of the plug's rating. So here in the US we are stuck with toasters, hairdryers, space heaters and electric kettles rated at 1500 watts at most (120 x 12,5)
As for the bit about "stupid panicky people" - I have no idea what you are talking about. Homeowners almost never install or change their own breakers, Whatever was in the panel when they bought the house is what they have - the electrician that installed and wired the panel will almost certainly have put 20 amp breakers if the wiring is 20 amp rated (12 gauge).
And I have no idea what is wrong with your breakers, but mine work fine. They don't trip when they shouldn't
Sigh - This site is supposed to be for nerds that understand tech. The urea does not "soak up" the emissions. A controlled amount of the urea solution is injected into the hot exhaust. At high temperatures the urea breaks down into ammonia. The ammonia in the exhaust then reacts in a catalytic converter with the NOx in the exhaust, reducing the NOx back to nitrogen. So if they are going to retrofit the adblue system into these cars, they have to add the urea tank, pumps, injectors, catalytic converters, additional sensors and revised software in the ECM. If the haven't previously emissions qualified the cars in question using the resulting modified arrangement, they are going to have to do the development and testing as well. If they are going to put $1000+ of new hardware in the cars,and have to mod the software anyway, they may as well revisit the whole engine tuning. They can probably INCREASE both the mileage and power if they can tune for performance and let the cleanup system handle the extra NOx.
This liquid cooling scheme is just a way to move the heat somewhere, but there still needs to be a heatsink, and fan, and with this liquid method also a fluid pump.
The advance here is that the working fluid is so close the the chip that the thermal resistance of the package is bypasses, theoretically allow either lower chip temperatures or more power without overheating.
Good thing you are not designing it - that would be hard to calibrate and monitor. In reality the rollers the car's wheels are driving are connected to a generator and resistor load. That makes it very easy for the test stand to simulate varying conditions (like climbing a hill)
The Mitsubishi iMiev comes close to that, but only because of $10K in combined California state and US federal tax credits. About $24K before the credits, net cost after is $14K Range is closer to 130 km than 150 km You will need a $500 charger - it doesn't just plug into a regular outlet A Tesla can plug into a regular 120V 15A US outlet, but it's like filling a swimming pool through a drinking straw. It only adds 3 miles of range for each hour of charging.
Charging at home (plugged into a 240V 50A dryer outlet) adds about 30 miles of range for each hour of charging. So, drive 200 miles, come home, plug in and the car is topped back up in under 7 hours. On trips, the supercharger stations (free to use and spaced within range on many interstates) add about 150 miles of range during a 30 minute stop. Superchargers are located next to places to eat and shop. Driving from SF Bay area to Reno, we stop somewhere in the middle (there are a several choices at various distances) and have lunch. Can't quite make it all the way on one charge....
Our Tesla S85 performs just about exactly like the range calculator predicts. Their claculator is quite accurate - and it should be. Tesla's have a full time connection to the internet via cell towers (was 3G until about a month ago, now 4G on current production.) The data plan is bundled with the cars quite considerable purchase price. Tesla uses the connection to monitor every card and collect data about all sorts of performance metrics.They know if you have a single bad cell in the battery pack. They know where you drove, how fast, altitude, temperature, whether you were using the A/C or heat.... Plenty of stats to know how the cars perform in the real world (and completely invade your privacy)
My wife also has a Tesla S85. On the freeway at 65 mph the range is about as advertised, 265+ miles. AC on a very hot day reduces that about 5%. Around town, stop and go 0-40 mph actually has better range, approaching 350 miles.
Legislating clean air has worked very well, thank you. I lived in Southern California in the era before laws that forced car makers to clean up their vehicles, and the air was so full of nasty stuff the nearby coastal mountains were invisible. The difference now is obvious and dramatic. The laws worked. I doubt the car makers would have ever done the required engineering without the legal mandate.
Something like 20+ years ago US emissions standards for cards and light trucks were changed from focusing on percentage pollutants in the tailpipe to "grams per mile". It has been that way for ages - if you are in the US, go look at the sticker on any new car at a dealership, or check out this EPA document http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/consu...
The theoretical rate is high, the actual tax paid is low. Tax expemptions and credits and offshoring of profits have allowed US corporations to legally avoid most of the taxes they once paid.
Slashdot Mirror
At the moment there are no hydrogen refueling stations near most of the U.S. population. And when I just checked the California station finder map a significant fraction were "offline." On the other hand, almost everyone who can buy a new car also has electricity at their house. Our Tesla charges overnight at home - with nearly zero extra time taken beyond parking the car. Even if a fuel cell car fills faster, if I have to drive somewhere to fill it the time it takes out of my day is greater.
Tesla's supercharger network is already good, and getting better. Long trips are now pretty painless (as long as you are traveling on major route that has stations)
Perfect? Certainly not. But it is getting better, and so-called destination charging spots are being added even faster than supercharger locations. Tesla made the smart choice to put a 10KW charger onboard every car. So all a destination (hotel, resort, all-day attraction) needs to install is a simple 50A 240V outlet, of a type that is already the de facto standard at RV parks. No expensive charger to buy and maintain for the destination owner. Just a low cost plug that should work virtually forever once installed. It is going to be a lot harder to build out a nationwide network of hydrogen stations.
First sensible post in this topic. At even a mile away hand shake is going to be dancing the beam around a huge area, and it is going to be pretty spread out unless it is something with a large lens and not a handheld laser. (Look up "diffraction limited" if that means nothing to you.) I have a hard time reconciling pilots reports of having their sight "dazzled" or even damaged, with how little power, and for how little time, the beam could have been entering their eye.
It is not the problem you think it is. It is easy and fairly cheap to make a narrow band-stop optical filter. http://www.omegafilters.com/ca...
Knocking out a few narrow bands has little effect on the way the world looks.
Most UPS's are "pass through" devices that connect the incoming power directly to the output if the input has power. When the input power drops, a relay inside the ups switches the outlets to an inverter that is powered by a battery. They provide no protection against surges, other than the same kind of limited protection that a powerstrip with surge protection has.
There are "online" UPS's that do a full double conversation (AC->DC->AC) at all times. They are heavy and expensive, but do provide nearly perfect protection to the attached gear.
If I had mod points I would mod this up - most sensible post in this thread so far. So called surge suppressors are only useful to minimize the amplitude of very short, very high voltage but low total energy transients of the kind created by lightning (nearby, not a direct his) and other arc like events, such as sparks created by connecting and disconnecting loads.
If you are somewhere third world, and the nominal 220V line goes to 260V and stays there for a while (fractions of a second to many seconds) the kind of surge suppressor found in power strips is useless. Your adapter will probably fry - and with luck fail in a way that blows a fuse inside without sending any damaging over voltage to the device it is powering. Better quality power adapters have added parts on the output that clamp the DC to safe limits even if the upstream parts in the adapter are being overvoltaged to failure.
So use good quality (expensive brand name) adapters and take extras. They may die, but should sacrifice themselves to save the attached gear.
PS - I spent years in industry designing power distribution, regulation and filtering gear for pro audio - including equipment designed for touring sound that had to run from generators that would sometimes put out excess voltage for a relatively long time if too much load was shed suddenly.
Except we have substantial oil resources (and our no-so-liberal governor has had no interest in killing fracking), some of the largest agricultural exports of high value crops in the world, a budget surplus and a growing rainy day fund, silicon valley, world leading genetic engineering companies, a huge aerospace and defense industry, and universities like Stanford, Cal Tech, the whole UC system etc.
Not so much like Italy or Greece ...
Has anyone done a recent analysis of where these machines are, and what version of Windows they are running? XP use is finally fading, and I have seen a surprising number of home PCs successfully upgraded from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10.
I would not expect a malware infection to survive the update.
So are the number of bots in the network declining?
I just signed up for 365 for business. I supposedly get a 1 TB OneDrive account with it. Sounds great, until you try to use it. I have a pretty solid business cable modem internet account. Reliably 50/10 mb/s. ...
Three days ago I dropped an existing folder that had about 60 GB of content in roughly 36,000 files into the OneDrive folder on my desktop PC.
As of this moment, less that 50% has synced to the cloud, after more than 72 hours.
Files are uploading at about 350kb/s at best, with lots of pauses..
There are no preferences in the OneDrive client that allow me to tell it to go ahead and use more bandwidth.
Upload rates to my Google Drive on the same computer can saturate my local upstream, 30 times faster than OneDrive.
So I was searching on "slow OneDrive" and found that the very slow upload is universal - and universally despised.
The same searches also revealed something that is not at all clear when you sign up for Office 365: there is a hard limit of 20,000 objects (files+folders).
For my files, with an average size of about 1.7 MB, the maximum I can store is 34 GB, about 3% of the advertised terabyte.
I feel cheated
And I now know the folder I wanted to upload has too many items. I'm not sure what I am going to do. The whole point of the OneDrive was to make a complete set of some business files on my desktop available to my laptop while traveling. Yes, I know lots of other ways to do this, but since I wanted the Office 365 account for mail hosting in any case, the OneDrive space was a nice bonus. Except it is not really usable at all, and that is very frustrating.
I think you are the one failing to fully think through the math as it applies to this issue. It takes decades for a reduction in birthrate to cause an actual drop in population. Age of first birth and number of births per woman both have an effect, but given that at any given time there are 3-5 generations of people alive, a drop in the birthrate among young females only slows the rate of growth a little at first. When their children in turn start to have children, if that generation maintains a low birthrate, the rate of grown will decline more - but will still probably be a positive absolute increase. Going out to the grandchild generation, if that third generation maintains a low birthrate, the population will actually start to shrink, as the grandparents and great grandparents start to die at a rate that is higher than the birthrate.
Every child born, assuming he/she is educated and given the opportunity to work has the possibility to add more to the total wealth than they cost. I say every woman should be required to have 3 children to make sure that there are plenty of young workers to keep the economy going when I am old and retired. Who says they have the right to shirk that duty?
In fact the one child policy was intended to create gradual drop. Because of the large number of young people already born 30 years ago, who may just now be having their first child, while they and their parents are still alive, the population is still growing, and will continue to grow for many more years. If I recall correctly, the most optimistic projections, assuming widespread and nearly perfect compliance with one child per mother, had the population leveling off in about the year 2050/
This is a useful form factor for some niche applications. The Quantum Byte is a bit more money, but has ethernet, and the I/O ports are all built in - no dock. No battery either. I've used two of these: one sitting in a closet running the client software of a cloud based backup service. The tiny PC backs up the NAS it is sitting next to. I put VNC on the little PC and run it without any attached peripherals at all. The other one is sitting in the server room of a larger business and is connected to the systems there as an alternate way to access them that does not depend on the servers being up.
As others have mentioned it would also serve as a fine little media PC. I could see my parents using it as a full on home computer that was dead quiet, booted nearly instantly, and runs full versions of desktop apps. They have, and like, tablets for casual web browsing, but sometimes they want a big screen and a regular keyboard.
Are the creators of this material even aware of Vantablack? Their new material seems far inferior ...
You don't understand because you are not fully informed. Solar production peaks at noon. Electricity demand peaks much later - it varies by time of year and location, but it is never so early as noon.
I have time of day metering at my house. In the summer, peak rates are 1PM to 7PM. In the winter, peak rates are 5 to 8 PM.
I send the most power to the grid from my solar panels at a non-optimal time. If I could shift when I send that power to the peak demand time I would get paid more, and the power company would not need to fire up their relatively dirty and inefficient gas turbines so much in the evening.
Your answer is interesting mix mostly correct and subtly (but really) wrong.
In most modern US houses the kitchen has 20 amp circuits, but the the standard US plug and outlet (with parallel blades) is only rated at 15 amps.Worse yet, UL and similar safety agencies will not pass (certify) an appliance that draws a continuous load of more than 85% of the plug's rating. So here in the US we are stuck with toasters, hairdryers, space heaters and electric kettles rated at 1500 watts at most (120 x 12,5)
As for the bit about "stupid panicky people" - I have no idea what you are talking about. Homeowners almost never install or change their own breakers, Whatever was in the panel when they bought the house is what they have - the electrician that installed and wired the panel will almost certainly have put 20 amp breakers if the wiring is 20 amp rated (12 gauge).
And I have no idea what is wrong with your breakers, but mine work fine. They don't trip when they shouldn't
Sigh -
This site is supposed to be for nerds that understand tech.
The urea does not "soak up" the emissions.
A controlled amount of the urea solution is injected into the hot exhaust. At high temperatures the urea breaks down into ammonia.
The ammonia in the exhaust then reacts in a catalytic converter with the NOx in the exhaust, reducing the NOx back to nitrogen.
So if they are going to retrofit the adblue system into these cars, they have to add the urea tank, pumps, injectors, catalytic converters, additional sensors and revised software in the ECM. If the haven't previously emissions qualified the cars in question using the resulting modified arrangement, they are going to have to do the development and testing as well.
If they are going to put $1000+ of new hardware in the cars,and have to mod the software anyway, they may as well revisit the whole engine tuning. They can probably INCREASE both the mileage and power if they can tune for performance and let the cleanup system handle the extra NOx.
This liquid cooling scheme is just a way to move the heat somewhere, but there still needs to be a heatsink, and fan, and with this liquid method also a fluid pump.
The advance here is that the working fluid is so close the the chip that the thermal resistance of the package is bypasses, theoretically allow either lower chip temperatures or more power without overheating.
Good thing you are not designing it - that would be hard to calibrate and monitor. In reality the rollers the car's wheels are driving are connected to a generator and resistor load. That makes it very easy for the test stand to simulate varying conditions (like climbing a hill)
The Mitsubishi iMiev comes close to that, but only because of $10K in combined California state and US federal tax credits. About $24K before the credits, net cost after is $14K
Range is closer to 130 km than 150 km
You will need a $500 charger - it doesn't just plug into a regular outlet
A Tesla can plug into a regular 120V 15A US outlet, but it's like filling a swimming pool through a drinking straw. It only adds 3 miles of range for each hour of charging.
Charging at home (plugged into a 240V 50A dryer outlet) adds about 30 miles of range for each hour of charging. So, drive 200 miles, come home, plug in and the car is topped back up in under 7 hours. ....
On trips, the supercharger stations (free to use and spaced within range on many interstates) add about 150 miles of range during a 30 minute stop. Superchargers are located next to places to eat and shop.
Driving from SF Bay area to Reno, we stop somewhere in the middle (there are a several choices at various distances) and have lunch. Can't quite make it all the way on one charge
Our Tesla S85 performs just about exactly like the range calculator predicts. Their claculator is quite accurate - and it should be. Tesla's have a full time connection to the internet via cell towers (was 3G until about a month ago, now 4G on current production.) The data plan is bundled with the cars quite considerable purchase price. Tesla uses the connection to monitor every card and collect data about all sorts of performance metrics.They know if you have a single bad cell in the battery pack. They know where you drove, how fast, altitude, temperature, whether you were using the A/C or heat ....
Plenty of stats to know how the cars perform in the real world (and completely invade your privacy)
My wife also has a Tesla S85. On the freeway at 65 mph the range is about as advertised, 265+ miles. AC on a very hot day reduces that about 5%.
Around town, stop and go 0-40 mph actually has better range, approaching 350 miles.
Legislating clean air has worked very well, thank you. I lived in Southern California in the era before laws that forced car makers to clean up their vehicles, and the air was so full of nasty stuff the nearby coastal mountains were invisible.
The difference now is obvious and dramatic. The laws worked. I doubt the car makers would have ever done the required engineering without the legal mandate.
Something like 20+ years ago US emissions standards for cards and light trucks were changed from focusing on percentage pollutants in the tailpipe to "grams per mile".
It has been that way for ages - if you are in the US, go look at the sticker on any new car at a dealership, or check out this EPA document
http://www3.epa.gov/otaq/consu...
The theoretical rate is high, the actual tax paid is low. Tax expemptions and credits and offshoring of profits have allowed US corporations to legally avoid most of the taxes they once paid.