DRM ("Digital "rights" Management) is something that to me was a stupid idea in the first place in terms of legislating. Formally, DRM is the technologies being used to "certify" that copyrighted content is being used in the way and manner that the producer intended. It also gets into the concept of copyright licenses and what they are intended to cover.
Normally, a copyright license covers re-use and re-publication authority. For quite some time, there were publishers who would grant regional licenses to others who wanted to distribute some book, movie, or something else that would be copyrighted. For example, the movie studios of Hollywood would often grant a license for distributors to show their movies in different regions of America and later the rest of the world. This would be a distribution license where the terms and conditions for how the movie could be copied or displayed to mass audiences was spelled out, often in detail.
Where it gets crazy is that some lawyer started to add in clauses for things other than merely duplicating and distributing the copyrighted content, and started to put in all kind of other clauses placing additional restrictions that weren't even covered under normal copyright law where it changed not only how it could be copied but also how that content could be used at all.
Getting specific to computer software (how the Xbox applies here), there have been various schemes developed over the years by publishers who have tried to stop people from being able to duplicate software. For most computer users, duplicating software and sharing it with friends has been a common occurrence and the software publishers have the notion that they ought to be the only folks with either the ability or the "right" to duplicate content. The music and movie industries in particular have been very paranoid about getting involved with putting content onto computers, precisely due to the ease of being able to copy materials on computers.
Finally, most of the "content producers" (aka major software publishers & Hollywood entertainment companies) realized that using a purely technological solution to stop people from copying their products is impossible, so they decided to criminalize the act of duplicating content. No thought that perhaps DRM stops legitimate applications of the equipment including fair use (including personal fair-use), creation of content for those devices by "non-approved" 3rd parties (not illegal even though some equipment manufacturers would make you think so) and simply trying to figure out how something works (reverse-engineering.... also not illegal in spite of people suggesting otherwise).
This isn't even getting to the legality of silly things like a shrink-wrap license agreement and other legal instruments that go into effect in spite of the fact that no contracts have been signed or being held to the terms of these kind of contracts.
In America, the Library of Congress has been given the duties of collecting the registration deposits for anybody wishing to formally register their copyright with the U.S. congress. If you wish to apply for copyright (as opposed to simply letting copyright be automagically applied upon putting content on a "fixed medium") you need to fill out some forms and send a couple copies of whatever copyrighted material you wish to have enforced to the Library of Congress.
This organization, the Library of Congress, is a very interesting organization. It is not an executive branch agency but rather falls strictly under the authority of the legislative branch entirely, and is governed by a committee of congressmen where the "Librarian of Congress" is appointed jointly by the President pro tem of the U.S. Senate and the Speaker of the House. The U.S. President has no say at all in the operations of the Library of Congress.
Originally, this library was a simple resource that members of congress would use to either pass some time or to research legislation (back when members of congress actually wrote their own legislation). In other words, an ordinary library but one that had some interesting people as regular clients. The original collection was started through a donation by Thomas Jefferson, burned down by the British in the War of 1812, and then rebuilt again. In an effort to establish the library and to cut down on expenses, congress (since it does write the laws of the country) set up a tax^h^h^h donation system where every publisher who wants copyright enforced in America would send a copy of their book, movie, or other publication to the Library of Congress... done for the express purpose so Congress wouldn't have to pay for any of the books in this library. As a result, the Library of Congress now has the single largest collection of books and copyrighted material in the world.
The reason why the opinion of the Librarian of Congress matters her is mainly due to the fact that over time the role of the librarian has expanded beyond merely a conservator of these books but also to be a legal expert in terms of copyright law and to be the main source of opinions over what is legal without having to go to the court system. The opinion of the Librarian of Congress matters in terms of judicial rulings and has been given over time extra authority that would typically be found only with the executive branch of government. It is this additional authority that has been granted to this political office over time which is why the Library and the Librarian of Congress matter in this case.
Of course this is a big deal because Microsoft has been able to bribe^h^h^h^h^h give campaign contributions to enough key politicians including state attorney generals, congressmen, and state legislators that they can pretty much have their way in terms of what laws are written and when they are enforced. Money==power and in this case the "golden rule" applies: "He who has the gold makes the rules". Microsoft seems to have a fair bit of "gold" to spread around, as long as the politicians get their fair cut of the profits.
Ever wonder why Microsoft suddenly has almost no problem with the anti-trust lawsuits any more? Bill Gates thought originally that political campaign spending was a waste of money until the legal troubles started to come up, and then Microsoft set up one of the largest corporate lobbying groups in D.C. and established a couple dozen "political action committees" strictly for the purpose of getting sympathetic congressmen re-elected. And then all of Microsoft's legal problems disappeared like the morning dew. Did you really think Microsoft changed its business practices through all of that?
This prosecution is all about that political influence and how Microsoft now controls the judicial system because of its continued political activity. Opinions of ordinary folks be damned when a Microsoft lawyer can get a phone call direct to a senator or lead prosecutor to make sure their opinion is heard while you or I of more modest means would be sent through a maze of petty bureaucrats and politely or not told to go away because of our lack of importance.
It seems amazing that you can go to prison for "intellectual property" violations... which normally are strictly a civil court issue that can only make you go bankrupt. Seriously, how does sending somebody to prison fit within the congressional authority "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"? If America was a real republic rather than a corporate kleptocracy, things like the U.S. Constitution would matter and the law that this is being prosecuted under would be declared unconstitutional. "Anti-piracy" laws should not be made a criminal matter and can't really be justified as such.
Looking back at historical examples of human migration on vast scales, the typical amount of time that somebody relocated from say one continent to another was usually on the scale of months, to perhaps a year or two. A trip from Germany or Poland to California in the 1850's took approximately about a year, including travel by ship to one of the eastern US ports, and then overland on foot or wagon.
I note this because that is about the current level of technology in terms of travel to various destinations around the Solar System at the moment, and one of the reasons why I think it is going to be comparatively trivial to make the trip to locations of that nature. Interstellar distances are going to take a leap of logic to move out that far and even with "exotic" but physically possible (Relativity equations don't keep you from making the trip as you suggest) modes of travel. At least right now, if you make a trip to Mars you can cut your losses and return to the Earth even using a Hohmann transfer orbit doing a minimal delta-v flight in a lifetime.... you can do several trips of that nature, much less something with more exotic propulsion like a nuclear rocket engine or something else similar.
Somebody making a trip to Alpha Centauri might be able to make a return trip... if they really care to. But by the time they return home nearly everybody that they cared for would be dead from old age including newborn infants they might have known before they left.
As you have suggested here, it is something possible and within 800 lightyears I'm fairly certain that we might be able to find a place at least as habitable as Mars that would be worth the trip out there to build homes and make a life. My question is.... why would we?
Life would have to be getting pretty ugly here in the Solar System for somebody to be that motivated to travel those kinds of distances.
I made the additional mistake of moving from the mid-west to the west and changing states.... which didn't help much either. Had I simply stayed put in the state where I graduated with the associate's degree instead of moving west (due to family pressure.... sometimes you just have to tell your parents that they are full of it) I likely would have graduated in about two years.
The advise to contact the guidance office is good. Even better is to contact the department for the major you wish to earn and get their advise over what classes you want to take... often even before you start taking classes during your freshman year in the junior college. Also, make sure you come with the course catalog for the junior college with full descriptions, or better yet bring the course syllabus for the courses that you took, particularly if you are thinking of transferring to a school where graduates of that junior college typically don't go.
As you indicated, particularly for state schools, there is an effort to coordinate curriculum, but it is something that you can't ignore and I'm merely trying to suggest that there can be problems with that approach too, particularly when the faculty of the school you may wish to attend after junior college have a bias against transfer students.
Again, I am not faulting the community college in this case, as I had an excellent education with some tough instructors and actually learned a whole bunch in those classes too. It wasn't merely punching a ticket but being able to really dig my teeth into the topic. I wish several of my university courses had the same quality of instructors as that, but instead I ended up with either instructors that didn't speak English or a pit class where the real teaching was done by a teaching assistant holding a bachelor's degree with the ink still wet. Disillusionment with the university was just the tip of the iceberg here.
I did the Community College thing, and my transition to a larger University ended up being a major pain in the behind. Showing up at a school as a "junior" instead of a "freshman" ended up being nearly the worst thing I could have done as I was both fiscally unprepared, and the university treated nearly all of my credits as wasted time. I think I had one class successfully transfer and that was an art class (for an engineering degree). Yes the raw "credits" transferred... as electives.
My transition could have been a whole bunch better, and I don't blame the community college that I attended as it had some outstanding instructors. It was just that most major universities that I've come across ignore associate's degrees and are so focused into their own 4-year programs that they really can't take a transfer student and integrate that student into their curriculum. They also dismiss other courses taught at other institutions, mainly following a sort of "not invented here" attitude.
This may be something that has been changing somewhat since I got my degree, but make sure if you do something like this that you have your eyes wide open and are in constant communication with the school you intend to graduate from with a bachelor's degree if you are going to be taking classes from a two year college. For myself, the associate's degree counted for about a half a semester of classes, and that was about it. Yes, I was frustrated and angry about the whole thing too. Some people may have a better experience than I had, and there certainly were better schools that I could have attended in terms of finishing my bachelors in a more timely manner. Unfortunately, family politics sometimes is worse than school or community politics.
I was trying to imply that a professor who was such an outstanding instructor that a bunch of his students ended up winning the Nobel Prize later on in their careers ought to be considered somebody of honor and distinction. Even if they end up with only modest grants, it is the professor who comes up with the bucks which is recognized for tenure and promotion and not the professor who teaches students.
A university education "used to be" something reserved for the elite minority of society that happened to be well connected or wealthy. And then the "land grant" universities showed up that attempted to democratize the institution... although it should be pointed out that most land-grant colleges in America were organized initially to provide an officer corps for the state militias, with the federal service academies providing the officers.
It also was more than coincidence that for most of the 19th Century most of the civil engineers, indeed most engineers in general in America, were graduates of the military service academies. How many people per year did that represent?
Even as recently as when my parents graduated from high school, most people could find work, even "professional" employment, without a college degree. What has happened is that so many people now have a university degree that a High School Diploma is now mostly meaningless except as a way to filter out the bottom 5% of society.... not really something I think is a good thing either. It sort of forces those folks to take advanced courses of "education" in the penal system instead.
I think it is entirely possible for a "university" to exist without even teaching students at all. Perhaps call it a "research lab" instead, but the needs of teaching students doesn't necessarily coincide with scientific study. While the Jet Propulsion Lab is "operated" by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), there really isn't a need to necessarily have any students working at that facility except perhaps as interns.... and they don't even have to be students at that school in order to work there either.
It is an interesting problem, but I do think that there are ways that scientific research could happen if there was even more of a separation between teaching and research. I do see the benefit to having somebody who is literally on the bleeding edge of scientific learning to be also teaching an introductory course for freshmen students, but I hate to break the news that is something which seldom happens anyway. Most universities that I'm familiar with barely take into consideration teaching ability at all when deciding to grant tenure, and things like papers published or research grants accepted (dollars generated) play a much larger role in promotions. Seriously, which kind of professor is likely to be better recognized by a typical university: A professor who has mentored a dozen Nobel Prize winners to earn their PhD's (all of whom are at other schools) but generated no grants at all, or a professor who has generated $100 million in grant funding? The bottom line is the bottom line, even at universities.
You should note here that neurosurgeons are usually licensed by a state medical board that notes who has the necessary skills to qualify for that task. Indeed there are a number of laws that are in place making it illegal (often a felony) to practice medicine without a license... basic first aid usually being an exception and even that has credentials from organizations like the Red Cross if you care to go that route.
There are many other professions where licenses are required but a formal degree isn't, including being a pilot, driving trucks, or the construction trades. I have seen degrees offered for those choosing to fly airplanes, but it is possible to become a pilot for a major airline without it. Not as easy, but it is possible.
Formerly, most engineers were trained "on the job" as a sort of apprenticeship system where the employer would eventually teach you enough information to pass whatever formal "certified engineer" license was required for the "master engineer" or however you wanted to term it. Instead, this has been pushed onto the university system in most cases simply because companies needing engineers are getting lazy and don't want to deal with the expense themselves at training new engineers. I think that speaks volumes for how the state of engineering is going these days rather than necessarily a failure of universities.
Would I get under the scalpel of a licensed neurosurgeon that didn't have a formal medical degree? Presuming that the state certification process isn't simply a rubber stamp of a college degree but represents some sort of "proof" that the guy knows what he is doing via demonstrations of his art, yes, I wouldn't mind being operated upon by such an individual. It does beg the question as to what the best way to train people for these professions ought to be, and if it must require a formal university education or if other routes to that knowledge could be found?
I should note that one of the stipulations about getting its charter with the Wikimedia Foundation was that the concept of granting degrees or even credits would be thrown out the window until such time as an accreditation process could ever be established. Still, there are some interesting courses that can be taken if you are really interested in learning, as opposed to punching a credential ticket.
Would such a University give out degrees? I'm not sure such a thing would hold much clout. I would have to stoop to actually getting to know a potential hire from this university rather than stare at their GPA and 'work' experience!
While insightful, this comment points out the main problem with a University education:
It isn't to teach or educate people but rather to come up with a method to allocate "union cards" to various professions and to restrict entry into those fields. If along the process somebody actually picks up some of the knowledge necessary to engage in that profession perhaps might have some use in society, but don't let anybody fool you into thinking that the role of a University has much if anything to do with actually passing knowledge along.
There are some professors who do enjoy sharing the knowledge that they have, and sometimes (rarely) an entire department of like-minded people do get together too where their students actually do pick up some knowledge that is useful to whatever it is that they are studying. There are also a whole bunch of professors who have an ego the size of the Moon and mostly want to show off their intellect at the expense of their students, or professors who don't have a clue about how to even teach in the first place (as if a PhD included a component about how to pass on the knowledge they've acquired over the years).
Any time a profession is talking about raising standards and insisting upon credentials like certificates or degrees, it is to throw out potential candidates in a job screening process. Perhaps a degree shows some persistence to get through the bull that some professors throw at you, and there is a certain aspect to life in general where you need to deal with bureaucrats and people who are out to tear you apart and kick you when you are down. I suppose the conventional university process does a good job at forcing people to deal with that aspect of life, and those that don't are thrown to the waste heap of society in spite of whatever intelligence they may posses or other skills in life.
yep all we need now is a viable power storage tech so you know can go more than 50-100 miles without needing a 6 plus hour recharge. Until we can find a power source capable of driving an electric car 200 miles at highway speeds they will be just a gimmick.
Yes, there is a power source capable of driving a car over 200 miles at highway speed without a 6+ hour recharge: It is a gasoline engine. If you want that to power an electric generator instead of going direct to the drive train, that is your problem.
If you are talking recharging with electrical power and not something using chemistry (aka hydrocarbon bonds of some kind) the problem you are facing is one of simply getting that much energy delivered. I suppose you can hook a high voltage power line with a straight connection from a nuclear power plant to your automobile, but it wouldn't be something I would encourage. There are no shortcuts here, and the problem isn't necessarily the storage technology (which also is an issue) but also the delivery methods. Whenever I hear of somebody claiming they can recharge a battery in 10-15 seconds, I start to wonder if they really have a clue what they are talking about or if they are talking a realistic battery that can be used for more than 10-15 seconds to power a real automobile.
It simply takes time to deliver this much energy, and those fuels centered around the benzene molecule can deliver large quantities of energy more rapidly than almost any sort of electrical power source.
JB Straubel, the lead engineer at Tesla, goes into some of the problems and what they did to fix them for the transmission. This is a dated post and there has been some continued work on the transmission, but goes over most of the issues involved.
Previously, Tesla had contracted the part out to a conventional transmission manufacturing company that supplies transmissions for the major auto companies, but that company was unable to deliver anything that was able to last for more than a couple thousand miles. When the engineers had to start replacing transmissions on a regular basis with the engineering prototypes, they knew there was a problem.
The reason why it is easy to compare Tesla to GM in this case is that both companies are on the same playing field at the moment. These are both vehicles intended for serial production and sold to a mass market, not some sort of prototype that only a handful are special crafted with no regard to cost.
If Tesla can afford to use exotic materials and manufacturing tech, there is no reason why GM, a much larger and better funded company with access to many more suppliers and engineers, couldn't do the same thing. If the situation was flipped I'd have to agree, but this is the tail wagging the dog so to say.
Costs are going to be comparable, and from the sounds of it the Tesla Model S.... which is going to cost nearly the same as the GM Volt... can pull a 0-60 in about 6 seconds and be able to get to speeds over 100 mph with just an electric motor. The Volt takes nearly 10 seconds to do the same thing and may take even longer. So if the two vehicles are at the same price and being sold to the same customers, what is the problem again? Why is a new start-up able to get exotic materials where a century old multi-billion dollar revenue company can't get those same materials?
Battery technology is one of those things that is seeing huge changes at the moment, and the role of batteries in automobiles that hold a large charge for an electric automobile is one design realm that has yet to really mature. Tesla has been more than up front about the fact that their batteries are essentially a ramped up laptop battery.
I will indeed give kudos to General Motors in terms of their battery research, and that is one area that they certainly have an engineering lead, where GM has been putting some significant R&D resources over the course of a couple of decades into finding better battery technology.
One company that I bumped into that seems to have some interesting potential for an automotive battery pack with some real kick, and a relatively low cost is Fluidic Energy out of Scottsdale, Arizona. Somehow they were able to convince the U.S. Department of Energy to help support their research, and are now on their second round of funding in addition to some private financing for their projects. If you believe the hype that this company is claiming, in theory an electric vehicle with a 1000 mile driving is possible with this technology, at a cost that is "considerably less" than the typical Lithium-ion batteries. The company website is rather sparse, but a Google search for the company does bring up some other interesting articles about this company, including a video of the inventor of the concept used for this company.
Tesla is still trying to get two sets of gearings in their vehicles, one for getting around town and another for highway cruising. For their "Signature series" they worked with a closed single set of gears that merely adjusted the RPM ratio to the wheels. There was never any serious attempt to go beyond two sets of gears, and even then the transmission had to be rather robust to cope with the torque of the Tesla engine.
Sure, speed is easy. But have you seen it done on a serial production automobile? Most of the electric vehicles I've seen have been essentially glorified golf carts that could crack about 20 mph... well maybe 40 mph safely. The vehicles you are citing here are all internal combustion engine vehicles that have been designed from its inception to be traveling at highway speeds.
What I'm saying here is that apparently whatever it is that Tesla was able to pull off in terms of performance, it is something that GM was unable to duplicate and somehow had to Rube Goldberg in some wild system that makes their vehicles much, much more complex. You say it isn't impressive that a Roadster can get over 100 mph, so why is the Volt apparently having problems with achieving that speed when they are putting extra design work into doing just that... if reading between the lines in the article suggests some sort of extra mechanical system that kicks in at 70 mph?
What got GM to pay attention to the electric vehicle market again was when Martin Eberhard showed up at the GM headquarters and had a lengthy discussion with the then CEO of GM about the future of electric automobiles and roughly the strategy that Tesla Motors was using to get into the marketplace. Basically the discussion ended up with the conclusion that if a new company could start up from scratch based around electric vehicles, that an established company with an engineering group already having skills in the area ought to be able to compete handily. He ended up essentially betting the future of the company in terms of moving in this direction.
It is noteworthy too that while most of the engineering staff was laid off and other projects were shelved, the Volt was one R&D line that was kept going and in fact was given an extra boost after the take-over and reorganization. Most of the other "concept cars" that GM has been famous for are no longer being developed or even looked at.
51% of the stock is enough to control a majority of the board of directors, which in turn also gives you the ability to do just about anything you want with the company in terms of day to day actions. Directors still have to act on behalf of all of the shareholders, but controlling interest in this case permits the person holding 51% of the shares (or more) to set major policy decisions, decide who is the CEO and pretty much the rest of the employees in the company too. You may not be able to dissolve the company or engage in a formal merger without a super majority, but almost all day to day decisions can be decided by the majority owner in a situation like this.
The only time you would get into trouble is if you started to do things that violated major sections of the corporate charter, which in most cases includes a clause like this: "The purpose of this company is to maximize profits and increase shareholder equity". If you are doing something that decreases the value of the company, the other shareholders can go after you for violating the purpose of the charter. But as long as you are increasing the overall value of the company, there isn't much minority shareholders can do to stop you. BTW, some companies (notably Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream) don't have this clause in their corporate charter but instead have other purposes for which the company is organized. Maintaining a minority stake in the company is one way to ensure that at least the corporate charter interests are being maintained.
In the case of GM, before the Treasury Department took over the company, no single person had more than about a 10% stake in the company, mainly due to the sheer size of the organization. The UAW stake in the company is also something very new and one of the things that many of the previous shareholders complained about. When GM is finally divested from the U.S. government (an IPO is being organized to make that happen), the United Auto Workers will end up as the largest shareholder of the company and be largely responsible for setting major company policies. It will be very interesting to see what a company "controlled" by a labor union of this size is going to be looking like.
Thomas Jefferson did support the abolition of slavery. He felt that it was an institution whose time has served its purpose and that it should happen gradually, over the course of a couple of generations rather than all at once, but that it was important to end the institution at some point in the future. At the time he was alive, it was a dying institution as it was with many slave holders emancipating their slaves... usually at their death. Most of them didn't want their children to continue to be slave holders.
Economics was the major driver here, and it was the invention of the cotton gin that placed renewed interested in slavery for the southern U.S. states. Dixie was one of the first places to be hit during the industrial revolution for a supply of dirt cheap labor to mass produce cheap stuff for sale to the rest of the world. Cotton and linen became common exports to Europe and ended up being used for paper production (usually recycled used clothing) bedding and clothing. Why the Cotton gin made such a difference was the ability to act as a labor multiplier and allowing varieties of cotton that could grow in a much wider group of climates than the earlier varieties that were commonly used for clothing. This renewed demand for labor and the economics supporting slavery in the early 1800's is what made the U.S. Civil War so ugly as huge economic interests were on the line.
If you are trying to be sarcastic, at least try to use a valid analogy or something resembling truth.
The Tesla "Model S" is going to be costing about $50k per vehicle, and if you add in maintenance costs for a convention internal combustion engine over the lifespan of about 150,000 miles driven in the vehicle, that model starts to get real attractive compared to new cars. It still doesn't compete on the really low end, but Tesla is trying to push after the "luxury" automobile market like BMW, Lexis, and Cadillac rather than the cheaper end vehicle. The Model S isn't going to be a high performance sports car, but it is going to be a full-sized family vehicle capable of holding 3-4 kids plus parents and some groceries. The Roadster has trunk space for a golf bag and that is about it. That size was by design on the Roadster too.
There is a "Blue Star" vehicle that is supposedly going after the lower tiers of the auto industry, but I'm not holding my breathe for that to get built. The Model S, on the other hand, is already at the production prototyping stage with versions already on the highway so far as verifying performance and getting it ready for the battery of tests needed to get something into serial production.
But this article that was cited certainly makes a strong compelling case for encouraging carpooling as a significant alternative to mass transit infrastructure, particularly for people who do medium to long-range commuting. It is also something that I think much of the direct government money involved with the building of mass transit enterprises could be used instead to help organize and perhaps even help subsidize some carpooling alternatives. This would be especially true in suburbia where most other forms of mass transit are horribly inappropriate
I remember when I was a taxi driver doing a comparison between the fleet of taxis where I was at (a mostly suburban Utah County, Utah) where the other drivers working for the cab company and I sat down during some down time and calculated the real cost of providing bus service for the county (at the time about 15 bus route mainly concentrated among the high population centers... it has expanded somewhat, but the principle still holds true). After figuring in our own wages, costs of new high fuel efficient automobiles and presuming lousy gas mileage far worse than even used cars, we calculated it would be either a wash or even a modest net savings to taxpayers if we simply provided taxi service for direct point to point delivery of passengers. This did not include the fares but it did include published federal, state, and local subsidies that were being used to pay for the bus system. That was merely calculating the raw costs involved including passenger loads, presuming about 1.5 passengers per taxi trip, and not even suggesting perhaps that a fleet of hybrids in a "subsidized taxi fleet" might also help with environmental issues. It also calculated in the costs to pay for the drivers @ about 3x minimum wage.
There are definitely many places where urban bus systems really aren't cost effective and can cause more harm to the environment, the pocket books of the taxpayers involved, and on top of all that can put in a major inconvenience for those who need to use them. Furthermore, a taxi fleet could be much more scalable to the passenger demand needs. I'm not saying that a free public taxi system is necessarily the best route to go for a public transportation infrastructure, but it certainly ought to be something to consider.
BTW, I like the paper in terms of at least expressing a strong arguments of concern about a wholesale adoption of electric automobiles. Still, statements like this one in the paper like this one make me think there is a definite axe to grind with regards to its authors: "There is a deeply ingrained American attitude that says that the reward for all your hard work is the right to squander precious energy." (p. 138)
I could cite other parts too, but there is a political axe to grind with this paper that goes beyond merely documenting efficiency of various vehicles and trying to prove the case that somehow the concept of electric vehicles isn't necessarily the best way to go for moving people from point "A" to point "B". It does make you think, and seriously thank you for posting the link to this paper.
One thing that this whole episode does for me is to illustrate how far forward thinking Tesla Motors has been with their engine design. I'm not saying that Tesla has done everything right, but they don't seem to be suffering from performance issues on their electric motors. Roadsters on a track have been clocked at going over 100 mph, and have done sustained 80+ mph on freeways for some time. Of course the Roadster was designed from its inception to do this, but it is still none the less amazing.
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DRM ("Digital "rights" Management) is something that to me was a stupid idea in the first place in terms of legislating. Formally, DRM is the technologies being used to "certify" that copyrighted content is being used in the way and manner that the producer intended. It also gets into the concept of copyright licenses and what they are intended to cover.
Normally, a copyright license covers re-use and re-publication authority. For quite some time, there were publishers who would grant regional licenses to others who wanted to distribute some book, movie, or something else that would be copyrighted. For example, the movie studios of Hollywood would often grant a license for distributors to show their movies in different regions of America and later the rest of the world. This would be a distribution license where the terms and conditions for how the movie could be copied or displayed to mass audiences was spelled out, often in detail.
Where it gets crazy is that some lawyer started to add in clauses for things other than merely duplicating and distributing the copyrighted content, and started to put in all kind of other clauses placing additional restrictions that weren't even covered under normal copyright law where it changed not only how it could be copied but also how that content could be used at all.
Getting specific to computer software (how the Xbox applies here), there have been various schemes developed over the years by publishers who have tried to stop people from being able to duplicate software. For most computer users, duplicating software and sharing it with friends has been a common occurrence and the software publishers have the notion that they ought to be the only folks with either the ability or the "right" to duplicate content. The music and movie industries in particular have been very paranoid about getting involved with putting content onto computers, precisely due to the ease of being able to copy materials on computers.
Finally, most of the "content producers" (aka major software publishers & Hollywood entertainment companies) realized that using a purely technological solution to stop people from copying their products is impossible, so they decided to criminalize the act of duplicating content. No thought that perhaps DRM stops legitimate applications of the equipment including fair use (including personal fair-use), creation of content for those devices by "non-approved" 3rd parties (not illegal even though some equipment manufacturers would make you think so) and simply trying to figure out how something works (reverse-engineering.... also not illegal in spite of people suggesting otherwise).
This isn't even getting to the legality of silly things like a shrink-wrap license agreement and other legal instruments that go into effect in spite of the fact that no contracts have been signed or being held to the terms of these kind of contracts.
In America, the Library of Congress has been given the duties of collecting the registration deposits for anybody wishing to formally register their copyright with the U.S. congress. If you wish to apply for copyright (as opposed to simply letting copyright be automagically applied upon putting content on a "fixed medium") you need to fill out some forms and send a couple copies of whatever copyrighted material you wish to have enforced to the Library of Congress.
This organization, the Library of Congress, is a very interesting organization. It is not an executive branch agency but rather falls strictly under the authority of the legislative branch entirely, and is governed by a committee of congressmen where the "Librarian of Congress" is appointed jointly by the President pro tem of the U.S. Senate and the Speaker of the House. The U.S. President has no say at all in the operations of the Library of Congress.
Originally, this library was a simple resource that members of congress would use to either pass some time or to research legislation (back when members of congress actually wrote their own legislation). In other words, an ordinary library but one that had some interesting people as regular clients. The original collection was started through a donation by Thomas Jefferson, burned down by the British in the War of 1812, and then rebuilt again. In an effort to establish the library and to cut down on expenses, congress (since it does write the laws of the country) set up a tax^h^h^h donation system where every publisher who wants copyright enforced in America would send a copy of their book, movie, or other publication to the Library of Congress... done for the express purpose so Congress wouldn't have to pay for any of the books in this library. As a result, the Library of Congress now has the single largest collection of books and copyrighted material in the world.
The reason why the opinion of the Librarian of Congress matters her is mainly due to the fact that over time the role of the librarian has expanded beyond merely a conservator of these books but also to be a legal expert in terms of copyright law and to be the main source of opinions over what is legal without having to go to the court system. The opinion of the Librarian of Congress matters in terms of judicial rulings and has been given over time extra authority that would typically be found only with the executive branch of government. It is this additional authority that has been granted to this political office over time which is why the Library and the Librarian of Congress matter in this case.
Of course this is a big deal because Microsoft has been able to bribe^h^h^h^h^h give campaign contributions to enough key politicians including state attorney generals, congressmen, and state legislators that they can pretty much have their way in terms of what laws are written and when they are enforced. Money==power and in this case the "golden rule" applies: "He who has the gold makes the rules". Microsoft seems to have a fair bit of "gold" to spread around, as long as the politicians get their fair cut of the profits.
Ever wonder why Microsoft suddenly has almost no problem with the anti-trust lawsuits any more? Bill Gates thought originally that political campaign spending was a waste of money until the legal troubles started to come up, and then Microsoft set up one of the largest corporate lobbying groups in D.C. and established a couple dozen "political action committees" strictly for the purpose of getting sympathetic congressmen re-elected. And then all of Microsoft's legal problems disappeared like the morning dew. Did you really think Microsoft changed its business practices through all of that?
This prosecution is all about that political influence and how Microsoft now controls the judicial system because of its continued political activity. Opinions of ordinary folks be damned when a Microsoft lawyer can get a phone call direct to a senator or lead prosecutor to make sure their opinion is heard while you or I of more modest means would be sent through a maze of petty bureaucrats and politely or not told to go away because of our lack of importance.
It seems amazing that you can go to prison for "intellectual property" violations... which normally are strictly a civil court issue that can only make you go bankrupt. Seriously, how does sending somebody to prison fit within the congressional authority "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"? If America was a real republic rather than a corporate kleptocracy, things like the U.S. Constitution would matter and the law that this is being prosecuted under would be declared unconstitutional. "Anti-piracy" laws should not be made a criminal matter and can't really be justified as such.
Looking back at historical examples of human migration on vast scales, the typical amount of time that somebody relocated from say one continent to another was usually on the scale of months, to perhaps a year or two. A trip from Germany or Poland to California in the 1850's took approximately about a year, including travel by ship to one of the eastern US ports, and then overland on foot or wagon.
I note this because that is about the current level of technology in terms of travel to various destinations around the Solar System at the moment, and one of the reasons why I think it is going to be comparatively trivial to make the trip to locations of that nature. Interstellar distances are going to take a leap of logic to move out that far and even with "exotic" but physically possible (Relativity equations don't keep you from making the trip as you suggest) modes of travel. At least right now, if you make a trip to Mars you can cut your losses and return to the Earth even using a Hohmann transfer orbit doing a minimal delta-v flight in a lifetime.... you can do several trips of that nature, much less something with more exotic propulsion like a nuclear rocket engine or something else similar.
Somebody making a trip to Alpha Centauri might be able to make a return trip... if they really care to. But by the time they return home nearly everybody that they cared for would be dead from old age including newborn infants they might have known before they left.
As you have suggested here, it is something possible and within 800 lightyears I'm fairly certain that we might be able to find a place at least as habitable as Mars that would be worth the trip out there to build homes and make a life. My question is.... why would we?
Life would have to be getting pretty ugly here in the Solar System for somebody to be that motivated to travel those kinds of distances.
I made the additional mistake of moving from the mid-west to the west and changing states.... which didn't help much either. Had I simply stayed put in the state where I graduated with the associate's degree instead of moving west (due to family pressure.... sometimes you just have to tell your parents that they are full of it) I likely would have graduated in about two years.
The advise to contact the guidance office is good. Even better is to contact the department for the major you wish to earn and get their advise over what classes you want to take... often even before you start taking classes during your freshman year in the junior college. Also, make sure you come with the course catalog for the junior college with full descriptions, or better yet bring the course syllabus for the courses that you took, particularly if you are thinking of transferring to a school where graduates of that junior college typically don't go.
As you indicated, particularly for state schools, there is an effort to coordinate curriculum, but it is something that you can't ignore and I'm merely trying to suggest that there can be problems with that approach too, particularly when the faculty of the school you may wish to attend after junior college have a bias against transfer students.
Again, I am not faulting the community college in this case, as I had an excellent education with some tough instructors and actually learned a whole bunch in those classes too. It wasn't merely punching a ticket but being able to really dig my teeth into the topic. I wish several of my university courses had the same quality of instructors as that, but instead I ended up with either instructors that didn't speak English or a pit class where the real teaching was done by a teaching assistant holding a bachelor's degree with the ink still wet. Disillusionment with the university was just the tip of the iceberg here.
I did the Community College thing, and my transition to a larger University ended up being a major pain in the behind. Showing up at a school as a "junior" instead of a "freshman" ended up being nearly the worst thing I could have done as I was both fiscally unprepared, and the university treated nearly all of my credits as wasted time. I think I had one class successfully transfer and that was an art class (for an engineering degree). Yes the raw "credits" transferred... as electives.
My transition could have been a whole bunch better, and I don't blame the community college that I attended as it had some outstanding instructors. It was just that most major universities that I've come across ignore associate's degrees and are so focused into their own 4-year programs that they really can't take a transfer student and integrate that student into their curriculum. They also dismiss other courses taught at other institutions, mainly following a sort of "not invented here" attitude.
This may be something that has been changing somewhat since I got my degree, but make sure if you do something like this that you have your eyes wide open and are in constant communication with the school you intend to graduate from with a bachelor's degree if you are going to be taking classes from a two year college. For myself, the associate's degree counted for about a half a semester of classes, and that was about it. Yes, I was frustrated and angry about the whole thing too. Some people may have a better experience than I had, and there certainly were better schools that I could have attended in terms of finishing my bachelors in a more timely manner. Unfortunately, family politics sometimes is worse than school or community politics.
I was trying to imply that a professor who was such an outstanding instructor that a bunch of his students ended up winning the Nobel Prize later on in their careers ought to be considered somebody of honor and distinction. Even if they end up with only modest grants, it is the professor who comes up with the bucks which is recognized for tenure and promotion and not the professor who teaches students.
A university education "used to be" something reserved for the elite minority of society that happened to be well connected or wealthy. And then the "land grant" universities showed up that attempted to democratize the institution... although it should be pointed out that most land-grant colleges in America were organized initially to provide an officer corps for the state militias, with the federal service academies providing the officers.
It also was more than coincidence that for most of the 19th Century most of the civil engineers, indeed most engineers in general in America, were graduates of the military service academies. How many people per year did that represent?
Even as recently as when my parents graduated from high school, most people could find work, even "professional" employment, without a college degree. What has happened is that so many people now have a university degree that a High School Diploma is now mostly meaningless except as a way to filter out the bottom 5% of society.... not really something I think is a good thing either. It sort of forces those folks to take advanced courses of "education" in the penal system instead.
I think it is entirely possible for a "university" to exist without even teaching students at all. Perhaps call it a "research lab" instead, but the needs of teaching students doesn't necessarily coincide with scientific study. While the Jet Propulsion Lab is "operated" by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), there really isn't a need to necessarily have any students working at that facility except perhaps as interns.... and they don't even have to be students at that school in order to work there either.
It is an interesting problem, but I do think that there are ways that scientific research could happen if there was even more of a separation between teaching and research. I do see the benefit to having somebody who is literally on the bleeding edge of scientific learning to be also teaching an introductory course for freshmen students, but I hate to break the news that is something which seldom happens anyway. Most universities that I'm familiar with barely take into consideration teaching ability at all when deciding to grant tenure, and things like papers published or research grants accepted (dollars generated) play a much larger role in promotions. Seriously, which kind of professor is likely to be better recognized by a typical university: A professor who has mentored a dozen Nobel Prize winners to earn their PhD's (all of whom are at other schools) but generated no grants at all, or a professor who has generated $100 million in grant funding? The bottom line is the bottom line, even at universities.
You should note here that neurosurgeons are usually licensed by a state medical board that notes who has the necessary skills to qualify for that task. Indeed there are a number of laws that are in place making it illegal (often a felony) to practice medicine without a license... basic first aid usually being an exception and even that has credentials from organizations like the Red Cross if you care to go that route.
There are many other professions where licenses are required but a formal degree isn't, including being a pilot, driving trucks, or the construction trades. I have seen degrees offered for those choosing to fly airplanes, but it is possible to become a pilot for a major airline without it. Not as easy, but it is possible.
Formerly, most engineers were trained "on the job" as a sort of apprenticeship system where the employer would eventually teach you enough information to pass whatever formal "certified engineer" license was required for the "master engineer" or however you wanted to term it. Instead, this has been pushed onto the university system in most cases simply because companies needing engineers are getting lazy and don't want to deal with the expense themselves at training new engineers. I think that speaks volumes for how the state of engineering is going these days rather than necessarily a failure of universities.
Would I get under the scalpel of a licensed neurosurgeon that didn't have a formal medical degree? Presuming that the state certification process isn't simply a rubber stamp of a college degree but represents some sort of "proof" that the guy knows what he is doing via demonstrations of his art, yes, I wouldn't mind being operated upon by such an individual. It does beg the question as to what the best way to train people for these professions ought to be, and if it must require a formal university education or if other routes to that knowledge could be found?
You do realize that there is such a thing as Wikiversity:
http://en.wikiversity.org/
I should note that one of the stipulations about getting its charter with the Wikimedia Foundation was that the concept of granting degrees or even credits would be thrown out the window until such time as an accreditation process could ever be established. Still, there are some interesting courses that can be taken if you are really interested in learning, as opposed to punching a credential ticket.
Would such a University give out degrees? I'm not sure such a thing would hold much clout. I would have to stoop to actually getting to know a potential hire from this university rather than stare at their GPA and 'work' experience!
While insightful, this comment points out the main problem with a University education:
It isn't to teach or educate people but rather to come up with a method to allocate "union cards" to various professions and to restrict entry into those fields. If along the process somebody actually picks up some of the knowledge necessary to engage in that profession perhaps might have some use in society, but don't let anybody fool you into thinking that the role of a University has much if anything to do with actually passing knowledge along.
There are some professors who do enjoy sharing the knowledge that they have, and sometimes (rarely) an entire department of like-minded people do get together too where their students actually do pick up some knowledge that is useful to whatever it is that they are studying. There are also a whole bunch of professors who have an ego the size of the Moon and mostly want to show off their intellect at the expense of their students, or professors who don't have a clue about how to even teach in the first place (as if a PhD included a component about how to pass on the knowledge they've acquired over the years).
Any time a profession is talking about raising standards and insisting upon credentials like certificates or degrees, it is to throw out potential candidates in a job screening process. Perhaps a degree shows some persistence to get through the bull that some professors throw at you, and there is a certain aspect to life in general where you need to deal with bureaucrats and people who are out to tear you apart and kick you when you are down. I suppose the conventional university process does a good job at forcing people to deal with that aspect of life, and those that don't are thrown to the waste heap of society in spite of whatever intelligence they may posses or other skills in life.
yep all we need now is a viable power storage tech so you know can go more than 50-100 miles without needing a 6 plus hour recharge. Until we can find a power source capable of driving an electric car 200 miles at highway speeds they will be just a gimmick.
Yes, there is a power source capable of driving a car over 200 miles at highway speed without a 6+ hour recharge: It is a gasoline engine. If you want that to power an electric generator instead of going direct to the drive train, that is your problem.
If you are talking recharging with electrical power and not something using chemistry (aka hydrocarbon bonds of some kind) the problem you are facing is one of simply getting that much energy delivered. I suppose you can hook a high voltage power line with a straight connection from a nuclear power plant to your automobile, but it wouldn't be something I would encourage. There are no shortcuts here, and the problem isn't necessarily the storage technology (which also is an issue) but also the delivery methods. Whenever I hear of somebody claiming they can recharge a battery in 10-15 seconds, I start to wonder if they really have a clue what they are talking about or if they are talking a realistic battery that can be used for more than 10-15 seconds to power a real automobile.
It simply takes time to deliver this much energy, and those fuels centered around the benzene molecule can deliver large quantities of energy more rapidly than almost any sort of electrical power source.
I found the blog post I wanted to bring into this discussions:
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/engineering-update-powertrain-15
JB Straubel, the lead engineer at Tesla, goes into some of the problems and what they did to fix them for the transmission. This is a dated post and there has been some continued work on the transmission, but goes over most of the issues involved.
Previously, Tesla had contracted the part out to a conventional transmission manufacturing company that supplies transmissions for the major auto companies, but that company was unable to deliver anything that was able to last for more than a couple thousand miles. When the engineers had to start replacing transmissions on a regular basis with the engineering prototypes, they knew there was a problem.
The reason why it is easy to compare Tesla to GM in this case is that both companies are on the same playing field at the moment. These are both vehicles intended for serial production and sold to a mass market, not some sort of prototype that only a handful are special crafted with no regard to cost.
If Tesla can afford to use exotic materials and manufacturing tech, there is no reason why GM, a much larger and better funded company with access to many more suppliers and engineers, couldn't do the same thing. If the situation was flipped I'd have to agree, but this is the tail wagging the dog so to say.
Costs are going to be comparable, and from the sounds of it the Tesla Model S.... which is going to cost nearly the same as the GM Volt... can pull a 0-60 in about 6 seconds and be able to get to speeds over 100 mph with just an electric motor. The Volt takes nearly 10 seconds to do the same thing and may take even longer. So if the two vehicles are at the same price and being sold to the same customers, what is the problem again? Why is a new start-up able to get exotic materials where a century old multi-billion dollar revenue company can't get those same materials?
Battery technology is one of those things that is seeing huge changes at the moment, and the role of batteries in automobiles that hold a large charge for an electric automobile is one design realm that has yet to really mature. Tesla has been more than up front about the fact that their batteries are essentially a ramped up laptop battery.
I will indeed give kudos to General Motors in terms of their battery research, and that is one area that they certainly have an engineering lead, where GM has been putting some significant R&D resources over the course of a couple of decades into finding better battery technology.
One company that I bumped into that seems to have some interesting potential for an automotive battery pack with some real kick, and a relatively low cost is Fluidic Energy out of Scottsdale, Arizona. Somehow they were able to convince the U.S. Department of Energy to help support their research, and are now on their second round of funding in addition to some private financing for their projects. If you believe the hype that this company is claiming, in theory an electric vehicle with a 1000 mile driving is possible with this technology, at a cost that is "considerably less" than the typical Lithium-ion batteries. The company website is rather sparse, but a Google search for the company does bring up some other interesting articles about this company, including a video of the inventor of the concept used for this company.
Tesla is still trying to get two sets of gearings in their vehicles, one for getting around town and another for highway cruising. For their "Signature series" they worked with a closed single set of gears that merely adjusted the RPM ratio to the wheels. There was never any serious attempt to go beyond two sets of gears, and even then the transmission had to be rather robust to cope with the torque of the Tesla engine.
Sure, speed is easy. But have you seen it done on a serial production automobile? Most of the electric vehicles I've seen have been essentially glorified golf carts that could crack about 20 mph... well maybe 40 mph safely. The vehicles you are citing here are all internal combustion engine vehicles that have been designed from its inception to be traveling at highway speeds.
What I'm saying here is that apparently whatever it is that Tesla was able to pull off in terms of performance, it is something that GM was unable to duplicate and somehow had to Rube Goldberg in some wild system that makes their vehicles much, much more complex. You say it isn't impressive that a Roadster can get over 100 mph, so why is the Volt apparently having problems with achieving that speed when they are putting extra design work into doing just that... if reading between the lines in the article suggests some sort of extra mechanical system that kicks in at 70 mph?
What got GM to pay attention to the electric vehicle market again was when Martin Eberhard showed up at the GM headquarters and had a lengthy discussion with the then CEO of GM about the future of electric automobiles and roughly the strategy that Tesla Motors was using to get into the marketplace. Basically the discussion ended up with the conclusion that if a new company could start up from scratch based around electric vehicles, that an established company with an engineering group already having skills in the area ought to be able to compete handily. He ended up essentially betting the future of the company in terms of moving in this direction.
It is noteworthy too that while most of the engineering staff was laid off and other projects were shelved, the Volt was one R&D line that was kept going and in fact was given an extra boost after the take-over and reorganization. Most of the other "concept cars" that GM has been famous for are no longer being developed or even looked at.
51% of the stock is enough to control a majority of the board of directors, which in turn also gives you the ability to do just about anything you want with the company in terms of day to day actions. Directors still have to act on behalf of all of the shareholders, but controlling interest in this case permits the person holding 51% of the shares (or more) to set major policy decisions, decide who is the CEO and pretty much the rest of the employees in the company too. You may not be able to dissolve the company or engage in a formal merger without a super majority, but almost all day to day decisions can be decided by the majority owner in a situation like this.
The only time you would get into trouble is if you started to do things that violated major sections of the corporate charter, which in most cases includes a clause like this: "The purpose of this company is to maximize profits and increase shareholder equity". If you are doing something that decreases the value of the company, the other shareholders can go after you for violating the purpose of the charter. But as long as you are increasing the overall value of the company, there isn't much minority shareholders can do to stop you. BTW, some companies (notably Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream) don't have this clause in their corporate charter but instead have other purposes for which the company is organized. Maintaining a minority stake in the company is one way to ensure that at least the corporate charter interests are being maintained.
In the case of GM, before the Treasury Department took over the company, no single person had more than about a 10% stake in the company, mainly due to the sheer size of the organization. The UAW stake in the company is also something very new and one of the things that many of the previous shareholders complained about. When GM is finally divested from the U.S. government (an IPO is being organized to make that happen), the United Auto Workers will end up as the largest shareholder of the company and be largely responsible for setting major company policies. It will be very interesting to see what a company "controlled" by a labor union of this size is going to be looking like.
Thomas Jefferson did support the abolition of slavery. He felt that it was an institution whose time has served its purpose and that it should happen gradually, over the course of a couple of generations rather than all at once, but that it was important to end the institution at some point in the future. At the time he was alive, it was a dying institution as it was with many slave holders emancipating their slaves... usually at their death. Most of them didn't want their children to continue to be slave holders.
Economics was the major driver here, and it was the invention of the cotton gin that placed renewed interested in slavery for the southern U.S. states. Dixie was one of the first places to be hit during the industrial revolution for a supply of dirt cheap labor to mass produce cheap stuff for sale to the rest of the world. Cotton and linen became common exports to Europe and ended up being used for paper production (usually recycled used clothing) bedding and clothing. Why the Cotton gin made such a difference was the ability to act as a labor multiplier and allowing varieties of cotton that could grow in a much wider group of climates than the earlier varieties that were commonly used for clothing. This renewed demand for labor and the economics supporting slavery in the early 1800's is what made the U.S. Civil War so ugly as huge economic interests were on the line.
If you are trying to be sarcastic, at least try to use a valid analogy or something resembling truth.
The Tesla "Model S" is going to be costing about $50k per vehicle, and if you add in maintenance costs for a convention internal combustion engine over the lifespan of about 150,000 miles driven in the vehicle, that model starts to get real attractive compared to new cars. It still doesn't compete on the really low end, but Tesla is trying to push after the "luxury" automobile market like BMW, Lexis, and Cadillac rather than the cheaper end vehicle. The Model S isn't going to be a high performance sports car, but it is going to be a full-sized family vehicle capable of holding 3-4 kids plus parents and some groceries. The Roadster has trunk space for a golf bag and that is about it. That size was by design on the Roadster too.
There is a "Blue Star" vehicle that is supposedly going after the lower tiers of the auto industry, but I'm not holding my breathe for that to get built. The Model S, on the other hand, is already at the production prototyping stage with versions already on the highway so far as verifying performance and getting it ready for the battery of tests needed to get something into serial production.
But this article that was cited certainly makes a strong compelling case for encouraging carpooling as a significant alternative to mass transit infrastructure, particularly for people who do medium to long-range commuting. It is also something that I think much of the direct government money involved with the building of mass transit enterprises could be used instead to help organize and perhaps even help subsidize some carpooling alternatives. This would be especially true in suburbia where most other forms of mass transit are horribly inappropriate
I remember when I was a taxi driver doing a comparison between the fleet of taxis where I was at (a mostly suburban Utah County, Utah) where the other drivers working for the cab company and I sat down during some down time and calculated the real cost of providing bus service for the county (at the time about 15 bus route mainly concentrated among the high population centers... it has expanded somewhat, but the principle still holds true). After figuring in our own wages, costs of new high fuel efficient automobiles and presuming lousy gas mileage far worse than even used cars, we calculated it would be either a wash or even a modest net savings to taxpayers if we simply provided taxi service for direct point to point delivery of passengers. This did not include the fares but it did include published federal, state, and local subsidies that were being used to pay for the bus system. That was merely calculating the raw costs involved including passenger loads, presuming about 1.5 passengers per taxi trip, and not even suggesting perhaps that a fleet of hybrids in a "subsidized taxi fleet" might also help with environmental issues. It also calculated in the costs to pay for the drivers @ about 3x minimum wage.
There are definitely many places where urban bus systems really aren't cost effective and can cause more harm to the environment, the pocket books of the taxpayers involved, and on top of all that can put in a major inconvenience for those who need to use them. Furthermore, a taxi fleet could be much more scalable to the passenger demand needs. I'm not saying that a free public taxi system is necessarily the best route to go for a public transportation infrastructure, but it certainly ought to be something to consider.
BTW, I like the paper in terms of at least expressing a strong arguments of concern about a wholesale adoption of electric automobiles. Still, statements like this one in the paper like this one make me think there is a definite axe to grind with regards to its authors: "There is a deeply ingrained American attitude that says that the reward for all your hard work is the right to squander precious energy." (p. 138)
I could cite other parts too, but there is a political axe to grind with this paper that goes beyond merely documenting efficiency of various vehicles and trying to prove the case that somehow the concept of electric vehicles isn't necessarily the best way to go for moving people from point "A" to point "B". It does make you think, and seriously thank you for posting the link to this paper.
One thing that this whole episode does for me is to illustrate how far forward thinking Tesla Motors has been with their engine design. I'm not saying that Tesla has done everything right, but they don't seem to be suffering from performance issues on their electric motors. Roadsters on a track have been clocked at going over 100 mph, and have done sustained 80+ mph on freeways for some time. Of course the Roadster was designed from its inception to do this, but it is still none the less amazing.