I have my doubts on whether they're doing a nett-positive thing to the world, but from a purely technical angle - why are they using the web? Darknets have been around for a while. Good'ol Freenet comes to mind, and may be much better suited. That way they wouldn't have to have a target a-la Assange at all.
Use a distribution mechanism that, while it takes a bit more effort to get to work, allows untraceable unattackable, unaccountable distribution of the content.
GM, not unlike Toyota with its Prius, have tried solving a systemic problem - infrastructure to support mass deployment of EVs - from the car up.
If all human efforts to date can be belived, this simply can't be done.
What both GM and Toyota ended up with is a car that's more expensive than the ICE equivalent, and in the case of all plugin cars, whose distribution is capped and cannot scale because there just isn't enough electricity to go around to power everyone's car charge at 8AM and 5PM without massive investment in the grid that's not forthcoming.
This doesn't mean the problem can't be solved, or isn't being solved. In actual fact, it already has been. Better Place has approached the same problem as a systemic problem, solving it from the infrastructure down, rather than from the car up.
In a nutshell, they roll out the infrastructure, they own the batteries, and they sell miles like cell/mobile-phone companies sell minutes. This is not as bad as it sounds. We pay in two ways for a car - at the shop, and at the pump.
Better Place's idea is to take the same money at "the pump" as an ICE car would require. That "same petrol money (per mile)" - which we're already used to spending every week - is enough to: [a] Pay for 100% clean energy. [b] Pay for the battery, whose price drops off the car price, making the car 10K$+ cheaper. [c] Cross-subsidize the parts or even all of the car on a long-term plan. "Free iPhone on a 3 Year Plan", the "Corolla Version". [d] Make profit
Yes, that petrol money we're paying is enough to pay for the kilometers AND cover the car lease.
Don't jump if the idea of someone making a profit off your back offends you. That holds for the current system equally well, and unlike BPL, the Saudi Sheiks don't send you a cashback to pay for your car.
Not only that but the smart charging nature of the grid solution completely sidesteps the "everyone plugs in at 8AM and 5PM" problem by flattening the charge curve to accommodate the grid limitations of current infrastructure.
Plus, they have a "battery swap" system so if your battery is depleted and you want to "refill quickly" you just drive in and get it swapped by something that resembles a carwash for... no extra charge. This is not just a "my battery doesn't hold that much charge no more, please swap" solution. It also gives you access to new battery technology as it comes out without the need to re-buy the car, and more importantly, solves the range problem. Range, after all, is limited by the deployment of gas/petrol stations, not just the size of your tank. Better place is putting the swap stations on roads and charge spots at home, work and retail, before they start selling the plans - much like you'd expect AT&T to put up the towers before they come trying to sell you a phone.
How far from reality is all this? Here's the good bit.
It's here.
Israel is Country #1 and going retail in the next few months. They have already enough cars pre-sold to make Better Place profitable from day 1. Denmark is #2, 6 months on their Heels and Australia is #3, starting rollout out in a year or so, with Hawaii in the 'soon' mix as well. Tokyo (who has a 70,000 taxi fleet - the world's biggest) has been running a pilot with 24/7-driving taxis powered by BP's battery swap system for months now.
Renault has geared up to mass-produce compatible cars. Large family sedans, not little city-cars. Better Place also sealed deals with Chery in china, with General Electric for the charge spots, got 700mil$+ in VC money from banks in the middle of the GFC. They got good tax incentives in Israel and outstanding ones in Denmark (still no word on tax incentives Down Under).
BPL also dropped that they're in discussions with about 30 governments in the world.
It's looking VERY rosy for the EV. Just not because of half-measures a-la Volt.
As a sidenote, my money is in Lithium mines. If this flies, and it seems there's nothing to stop it, if we bunch up all laptop, prius, iphone and camera batteries in the world into one very big battery mountain, we're going to need about 4-5 of these mountains in the next 5-10 years. Demand will outstrip capacity in 4 years or so. Watch this space.
>> I can't believe they have Parkour classes. Oh, hell they do. Indoor and outdoor, and people come in droves. I do it myself. It's good for the soul;)
I was amazed they have very large, well instructed classes for kids (and I applaud the level of instruction - I have done Taekwondo for years and have a background in the military, so I believe I know enough to say our Parkour boys (Melbourne, Australia) have their act solidly together.
I was even more amazed that they accepted my 4yo (their official start age is 5, tho he gained his "early age" ticket in through merit).
Disclosure: I have 3 kids: a 7, 4 and 1-year-old. The first is a confirmed geek, second one is pending. The 1yo will, 10 times out of 10, find an IT device in a pile of non-devices and chew it.
Boobs don't mean squat to a 4YO (other than vague memories of food). More serious stuff does. Top things I am incredibly concerned with re early age kids and computer:
1. Teaching them to control and ward off gaming addiction. Yes, there is such a thing as gaming addiction, and it is completely not trivial to (teach them to) keep it at bay while having a life. This is not a no-brainer when you're a gamer dad - they see me dump 300 game hours into a large-scale RPG, despite it being after their bedtime etc. I need to minimize their exposure to ultra-violent games (Fallout, Borderlands), while focusing on games that have SOME developmental value. Spore and Civ are awesome from the moment they can read (they figure it out way faster than you'd think). Before that... I'll let other people answer. I'm not against "non-realistic" 3D shooters and getting their competitive shooter skills up to scratch, even from 4yo, despite what my wife says, so long as it doesn't emphasize the violence too much (Unreal Tournament is marginally ok in my books, as is "Prince of Persia") (sidenote: they both do Karate and Parkour classes, so anything Parkour-related is generally liked).
The real problem comes in the form of MMOs, which, in year/grade 2 in school, everyone plays. It's lame dumb-ass web-based MMOs (Penguins and Mushy Monsters) with a multitude of flash games, but all their friends hang there, and the BIG problem is that the games are built around them NEEDING to be there to maintain their avatars more often than not, which undermines (read: DESTROYS) my ability to teach them to have a life alongside a game. So I passionately despise them and do my best to entice the kids with real games or non-gaming activities.
2. YOUTUBE. When they find the badger song, you're DONE. You can seek a good asylum at that point, and plan to come back when they're 35. (ask me how I know).
3. Internet - I'm a believer in monitoring their usage rather than filtering it. Yes, there's a lot of nasty shit out there, and they're growing into a world where it's part of the backdrop they need to be able to contend with. From 4yo? You make that call with your own kids. I say might as well. If not at your place, they'll do it at their best mate's on a sleepover. It's not hard to find an unrestricted device nowadays. Any stuff I forbid will pull attention to itself, entice and pull them. If I don't, it'll just be "Yes, it's there, not a big deal, now where's the interesting stuff". .
Another thing that I found incredibly helpful (this was for the 7yo tho) - he got his computer in parts. He also got a paper with an OS matrix (with WinXP, Win7 and Linux), against their RAM requirements and gaming capabilities. And the CD/DVD for each. And I let them choose. Next project is to cut his wifi access on his PC, give him and old box and, if he wants networking, build his own linux wifi router. As I share time on the first two kids with my ex-wife, they only live with me some of the time. I routinely pull bits (and break stuff) on my older son's computer, to train up his troubleshooting skills.
Not only a genious technologist, but one with enough grasp on geopolitics, business, consumer behavior and macro-economics to singlehandedly start a movement that would outflank the entire global automotive AND oil industries.
Search for him on Youtube if you haven't heard the name before.
That said, it's not something my second-grader son would be able to appreciate as much as he would, say, Carl Sagan. Maybe when he's a bit older. Or maybe he'll have his own heroes.
I guess it'd be a bit different as the world he would come to would already have EV's as a for-granted thing, and remember little of a time when they were all but "decades+ away, if ever, science fiction" and when one man standing up to that multi-trillion-industry entrenched dogma and methodically converting the world over (while founding a company that'll probably end up an order of magnitude or more bigger than google in a few years) with the charm and the wit he does it with... that's hero stuff right there:)
Ah. Thought you meant PV's on the car roof or some such.
My understanding is that renewable en-masse is indeed the plan. They wanted to use PV in Israel, but I think they'll end up just burning CNG as a cleaner alternative to coal. I seem to recall something about the Israeli government not wanting to give them the land to do a national-sized PV farm.
Here in Australia I think they're mostly talking wind farms that AGL (a local utility that partnered with them) is throwing up, which is just as clean.
Another interesting bit of trivia is that in Denmark the local utility - DONG -dragged them in, because DONG makes >20% of their power from wind, most of which captured at night, and they end up paying the Germans to take it because they can't neither consume it nor store it.
With BPL they can build even more windmills, park the power in the national car fleet, then draw back on it during the day. Pretty amazing. BPL is nothing short of the holy grail to them.
And that ability to feed back in times of grid stress saves billions in reserve coal reactors that get fired up for 20 half-hours a year (some of these dollars will go straight back to BPL and allow them to ultimately charge us consumers less).
It's not about the quality of citations. Better Place's business model needs to be understood wholistically to be appreciated for its disruptive power.
I can write 20 pages about it, or I can point you at youtube where there's ample talks by Agassi where he takes the time to run people through what he's doing.
First off, charging a 22kWh car battery via photovoltaic is akin to filling the hoover dam with a drinking straw. It's can't be done. Check your physics.
Second, you charge the car from the grid, via a plug. Cars, on average, park 22 hours a day, and drive 2 hours a day. And it enables the smart grid operator (which is what Better Place is) to buy 100% renewable (essentially pick up as many long-term contracts for solar and/or wind as they need, taking the power whenever it's available, day or night, for the life of the turbine/solar farm), and save us burning coal.
You might say "It's expensive! Why would they?", but it actually makes perfect sense.
We consume miles, irrespective of how many gallons or Kilowatts it ends up. They sell miles. And if you look closely at what it costs them to sell you and me a mile, it's 5 parts lithium battery (which is they provide), and 1 part electricity. Buying more expensive "clean" electricity doesn't put a dent in their business model.
If all this is very new to you and you're asking what planet I just descended from, I suggest you go to Youtube, and see Shai Agassi present talks to anyone from the US congress, to Microsoft tech forums, TED, Berkeley think tanks, etc.
He raised 700Mil$ in the middle of a financial crisis, he's got 6 countries on the map with an A-Z model for country-wide EV adoption (from the right tax incentives, to supply of hundreds of thousands of electric cars already in production, to convincing every municipality and council to put charge spots and swap stations.
He's legit. Hawaii is on the map as well, and the US coasts are likely to follow in the not too distant future.
If anyone wants to Karma-whore, feel free to go get some YouTube links.
Let's connect the dots..... China wants to drive. They're adding more cars on the road a year than the US and Europe combined (~2-3mil/year national car parc growth) Chery, their biggest independent car maker, has signed a deal with Better Place. They're almost completely leapfrogging the Internal Combustion Engine altogether. Beijin's mayor deputy has visited Better Place in Israel multiple times. Right now, anyone who ignores what the hybrid-entrenched car companies (Read: Toyota, Chevrolet, Honda) are saying and has his ear to the ground knows one thing: Once an electric car stops being a greenie status symbol 10K$ more expensive than an ICE car, and starts being 10K$ cheaper than an ICE car (which is what the Better Place model does), Multi-Trillion-Dollar-Industry (Oil and Automotive combined) undergoes BIG disruption happens. All hell breaks loose. Priuses have moved in production from 10,000car/anum to 100,000car/anum. Renault, on the other hand, the boldest pure-EV company (and Better Place's biggest partner), just geared up for a 1,000,000car/anum production in Turkey. They know one thing: When Better Place starts running cross-subsidy ("Free iPhone on a 3-year-plan") on a car that's 10K$ car cheaper (batteries not included), subsidized by government to the tune of another 5K$-10K$, and is 5K$ cheaper than hybrid/ice because there is no ICE, and starts giving away cars for free...... and this is not distant future. This is 60,000 presold vehicles in Israel today, and retail rollout in the upcoming 4 months.... Then Renault doesn't have a demand problem like Toyota do. They have a supply problem. It becomes a question of how many cars you can hand out for free.
All the big players - namely countries - know this. It's no secret, and Shai Agassi is all over YouTube like a rash. Everyone is watching Israel, Denmark and Australia very closely. This is why Japan, China, Europe and the US have dumped 4 BIL$ into car battery production, when nobody is actually producing anywhere near this many cars yet.
By 2015-2016, there will be more electric cars sold than ICE ones.
And in the middle of it is the one technology pretty much all the big car players have agreed on - Lithium Ion. Afghanistan and Bolivia, large as their stash may be, is not happening anytime soon. It'll be Argentina & Chile's salt flats, slightly more expensive Lithium from spodumene ore in Australia, China (and to lesser extent North America and some other locations in the world), and for countries that are willing to pay premium for national security and divorcing workforce driving to work from import dependence like Korea - production from ocean seawater.
China is concerned wants to make sure it's lithium needs are served before everything else. This development is anything but surprising.
RMA=big, ugly time drain. Turf the defective parts and factor in a spares pile. (Or let your techie take them home and RMA them on his own time). He'll love you for it (tho he may get tempted to lie to you). Most parts that go faulty (business mobos, RAM, drives) are a dime a dozen and human time in the developed world is not.
'200 fart apps' is a side-effect of a huge creative force called a non-restricted (or nearly-unrestricted) army of free developers.
Sure, they do what the market wants, rather than what RIM's CEO deems is of a personal opinion could be useful.
pro: huge app base, huge choice of vendor for the same kind of app, unique idea apps (turn iPhone screen into a break light for a bicycle? etc etc). con: fart apps. Seriously, big whoop.
They go in a tight package. Ask Linus. Ask Bill. Ask Steve. RIM is not a platform for any 3rd party software dev that isn't actively being paid by RIM. It's not a platform - it's a standalone niche product.
The con might give your platform -1, but the pro gives it +100. Which is why RIM will never crawl out of its corporate niche.
Bussard claimed that what a Tokomak can do, an infinitely cheaper Polywell device can do better, with no radiation or hazard (on top of power produced). In a form factor small enough to fit on a medium yacht.
His research was under wraps for a long time (the Navy wanted this to power their big boats), then they cut off his budget, and he did one last act of a man who had very little left to live - he got in front of a Yahoo and Google tech forum, handed out everything he worked out in the last 15 years on handouts to anyone who'd take them from him, did a ~1 hour braindump that got put on the interwebs, and promptly kicked the bucket soon after.
Is it feasible? Energetically? Financially? Quite possibly yes. No reason to get excited yet, but his company will tell us in a year or two. They're now financed by -someone- (maybe google or yahoo as these organisations had interest in clean containable ways to power datacenters and have been actively approached for this financing), and emc2fusion will likely get busy building a full-scale energy-positive POC in the next few years.
If they turn out to be right, this is BIG. And it's career-changing if you work on a tokamak project - this will cheapen power by an order of magnitude, allow contained powerplants in very small form factors, and generally end up being the biggest disruption the energy market has ever seen. Nothing to get excited over.
If it pans out, the French will end up wearing their new tokamak (an uberexpensive adventure, as tokamaks go) in a less than complementary way. I'm surprised they didn't wait.
2012-2013. Better Place rolls out all of the east coast. Read: [a] Most of the national car fleet off oil in 10 years... [b]... and powered of 100% renewable energy... [c]... which, due to the distributed-battery-nature and smart-charging-grid/ERGO(=EV equivalent of a cellular network operator), becomes the first-ever national-scale distributed-battery-cache to cache up spare-dirty/renewable power generated at night(wind) or when the sun is out (solar), when it's cheap, and put it back into the grid when it's expensive... [d]... so BPL to purchase many many many long-term, all-you-can-produce, whenever-you-can-produce-it renewable power-generation contracts (= wind mills, solar farms)... [e]... making available "30% of my home power comes from clean" and "40% of my home power comes from clean" deals with your utilities, where "15% of my home power comes from clean" exists today... [f]... and there is so much margin in selling us our weekly dose of kilometers this way, that what we term today our "fuel budget" is enough to not only drive us the distance, it's enough to cross-subsidize, in part or in full, the car itself (read: Subscribe for the 69$ Mobile Phone plan for 3 years and get a free 1000$ iphone, in this case "Sign up for 24,000km a year plan and get a free family sedan)"... [g]... yes, there is enough margin in there to allow them to do it. In Israel, they've pre-sold enough to be profitable from day 1. Crazy.
This is happening, in Australia, in the next 3 years, with full support of the newly-elected labor government, right after Better Place get their Israel and Denmark deployments rolling (happening in 2011 and 2012).
Relax. Conroy isn't in a position to do anything, not only is there a Greens majority in the senate that'll mercilessly machine-gun the whole scheme down if it ever gets that far...... now he won't even be able to pass it in the house to begin with - the libs and independents are officially opposed to the filter, and even if every member of labour will vote in favor, he doesn't have enough for a "think of the children" bill.
And once everyone has an interwebs pipe as wide as the simpson desert for his last-mile and we start chewing up the UECOMM cross-pacific fiber bundle, the cost of implementing a filter will skyrocket even higher than it already is.
Yep. We got just the -precisely- well balanced minority government, to a. get a NO to get the filter shot down, not only in the senate where it would have been shot down anyway, but in the house of reps as well. b. get a YES on the NBN. c. get Better Place in (who were stamped all over the Labor's promised intentions in all but name, and who already landed access to ~100M$ of govt money in NSW) and thoroughly funded via some serious consumer-enticing EV-adoption tax breaks I suspect are coming circa 2012-2013..
We couldn't have dreamed of a better outcome.
We'll get the NBN and the EV fleet, then swing over to the liberals for a term or two, to clean up the financial mess that the above will have created, as we drive EVs to work or work from home at Gbps speeds to pay for it.
>> Not clear how one 'infringes' on such a patent One doesn't.
>> it's not clear why anyone's patenting this either. 1. Town gets headlines. 2. Town become famous. 3. Tourists come. 4. Residents have a new source of income.
>> Out of the box quite satisfactory but nothing special compared to HTC and the other smart phones. Ummm... hate to break in on your happy la-la dance with cold hard reality, but: If Exhibit A is the iPhone 4, it did not go into a world with no apps. It had 3 generations of compatible iOS apps to build on. If Exhibit A is the iPhone 1 doing its 2007 debut into a no-apps-written-yet ecosystem, then it had a very big advantage on the HTC devices: It beat them to market by 3 years!! and arguably spawned the idea of creating them (where them is large-screen finger-driven UI devices) in the first place.
If you don't see Turkish Islamist policy driving this and the bigger picture this fits into (radical Islam, oppressive regimes vs new-internet-driven-world-order, middle-east mentality and its differences from western mentality, arab nation politics, Turkey's NATO/european membership, Turkish internal right-left struggle and dirty laundry, Turkish history (murder/slaughter of 1,000,000 armenians last decade, try mentioning that on Turkish media), you're just another one of those people who just can't get geopolitics and need an oversimplified model - namely, a little demonizing circle drawn around one of the participants of an equation (typically ends being one of Iran, Al-qaeda, USA, Israel, George W, etc) with an "evil" sign pointed at it. If only the world were that simple. Fox and Al-jazeera do it equally well, depending on direction the guys with the remote wants the arrow pointed in.
I have a demonizing-circle detector. Every time I get someone draw me one (whether Erdogan from Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu from Israel, Ismail Hanniyeh from Hammas, Al Jazeera or Fox, I immediately know I'm being told a half-truth. Big problems don't fit in little circles, and the root causes are way more complex and way more distributed. If complexity can be equated to pain with people who can't grasp it, I'll invoke the following: "Life is pain, your highness. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something."
>> Ads on mobile phone? DO NOT WANT. YES WE DO. iAd is GOOD Two reasons: The minor one: More free apps on the store as app-writers will be able to live off the ad revenue.
The major one: Right now, every other app implements its own ads mechanism. Nobody's gonna sit and de-ad all them 0.99$ apps.
Enter iAd - a central OS-level facility to deliver ads. That's excellent. It's a single point of failure. Couple that with root access that allows you to modify any file on the system (that's a jailbreak, to the unix-uninitiated), and that spells one single place you need to jam a spanner (a cydia app that'll pro'lly boil up on Cydia inside 3.2 minutes from the iAd launch) and all ads in all your apps will just -go-.
Slashdot Mirror
I have my doubts on whether they're doing a nett-positive thing to the world, but from a purely technical angle - why are they using the web?
Darknets have been around for a while. Good'ol Freenet comes to mind, and may be much better suited. That way they wouldn't have to have a target a-la Assange at all.
Use a distribution mechanism that, while it takes a bit more effort to get to work, allows untraceable unattackable, unaccountable distribution of the content.
How will anyone, future employer or other, ever actually find out you read something?
GM, not unlike Toyota with its Prius, have tried solving a systemic problem - infrastructure to support mass deployment of EVs - from the car up.
If all human efforts to date can be belived, this simply can't be done.
What both GM and Toyota ended up with is a car that's more expensive than the ICE equivalent, and in the case of all plugin cars, whose distribution is capped and cannot scale because there just isn't enough electricity to go around to power everyone's car charge at 8AM and 5PM without massive investment in the grid that's not forthcoming.
This doesn't mean the problem can't be solved, or isn't being solved. In actual fact, it already has been.
Better Place has approached the same problem as a systemic problem, solving it from the infrastructure down, rather than from the car up.
In a nutshell, they roll out the infrastructure, they own the batteries, and they sell miles like cell/mobile-phone companies sell minutes.
This is not as bad as it sounds. We pay in two ways for a car - at the shop, and at the pump.
Better Place's idea is to take the same money at "the pump" as an ICE car would require. That "same petrol money (per mile)" - which we're already used to spending every week - is enough to:
[a] Pay for 100% clean energy.
[b] Pay for the battery, whose price drops off the car price, making the car 10K$+ cheaper.
[c] Cross-subsidize the parts or even all of the car on a long-term plan. "Free iPhone on a 3 Year Plan", the "Corolla Version".
[d] Make profit
Yes, that petrol money we're paying is enough to pay for the kilometers AND cover the car lease.
Don't jump if the idea of someone making a profit off your back offends you. That holds for the current system equally well, and unlike BPL, the Saudi Sheiks don't send you a cashback to pay for your car.
Not only that but the smart charging nature of the grid solution completely sidesteps the "everyone plugs in at 8AM and 5PM" problem by flattening the charge curve to accommodate the grid limitations of current infrastructure.
Plus, they have a "battery swap" system so if your battery is depleted and you want to "refill quickly" you just drive in and get it swapped by something that resembles a carwash for... no extra charge.
This is not just a "my battery doesn't hold that much charge no more, please swap" solution. It also gives you access to new battery technology as it comes out without the need to re-buy the car, and more importantly, solves the range problem.
Range, after all, is limited by the deployment of gas/petrol stations, not just the size of your tank.
Better place is putting the swap stations on roads and charge spots at home, work and retail, before they start selling the plans - much like you'd expect AT&T to put up the towers before they come trying to sell you a phone.
How far from reality is all this? Here's the good bit.
It's here.
Israel is Country #1 and going retail in the next few months. They have already enough cars pre-sold to make Better Place profitable from day 1.
Denmark is #2, 6 months on their Heels and Australia is #3, starting rollout out in a year or so, with Hawaii in the 'soon' mix as well.
Tokyo (who has a 70,000 taxi fleet - the world's biggest) has been running a pilot with 24/7-driving taxis powered by BP's battery swap system for months now.
Renault has geared up to mass-produce compatible cars. Large family sedans, not little city-cars. Better Place also sealed deals with Chery in china, with General Electric for the charge spots, got 700mil$+ in VC money from banks in the middle of the GFC.
They got good tax incentives in Israel and outstanding ones in Denmark (still no word on tax incentives Down Under).
BPL also dropped that they're in discussions with about 30 governments in the world.
It's looking VERY rosy for the EV. Just not because of half-measures a-la Volt.
As a sidenote, my money is in Lithium mines. If this flies, and it seems there's nothing to stop it, if we bunch up all laptop, prius, iphone and camera batteries in the world into one very big battery mountain, we're going to need about 4-5 of these mountains in the next 5-10 years. Demand will outstrip capacity in 4 years or so. Watch this space.
>> I can't believe they have Parkour classes. ;)
Oh, hell they do. Indoor and outdoor, and people come in droves. I do it myself. It's good for the soul
I was amazed they have very large, well instructed classes for kids (and I applaud the level of instruction - I have done Taekwondo for years and have a background in the military, so I believe I know enough to say our Parkour boys (Melbourne, Australia) have their act solidly together.
I was even more amazed that they accepted my 4yo (their official start age is 5, tho he gained his "early age" ticket in through merit).
MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
Disclosure: I have 3 kids: a 7, 4 and 1-year-old. The first is a confirmed geek, second one is pending. The 1yo will, 10 times out of 10, find an IT device in a pile of non-devices and chew it.
Boobs don't mean squat to a 4YO (other than vague memories of food). More serious stuff does. Top things I am incredibly concerned with re early age kids and computer:
1. Teaching them to control and ward off gaming addiction. Yes, there is such a thing as gaming addiction, and it is completely not trivial to (teach them to) keep it at bay while having a life.
This is not a no-brainer when you're a gamer dad - they see me dump 300 game hours into a large-scale RPG, despite it being after their bedtime etc.
I need to minimize their exposure to ultra-violent games (Fallout, Borderlands), while focusing on games that have SOME developmental value. Spore and Civ are awesome from the moment they can read (they figure it out way faster than you'd think). Before that... I'll let other people answer.
I'm not against "non-realistic" 3D shooters and getting their competitive shooter skills up to scratch, even from 4yo, despite what my wife says, so long as it doesn't emphasize the violence too much (Unreal Tournament is marginally ok in my books, as is "Prince of Persia") (sidenote: they both do Karate and Parkour classes, so anything Parkour-related is generally liked).
The real problem comes in the form of MMOs, which, in year/grade 2 in school, everyone plays. It's lame dumb-ass web-based MMOs (Penguins and Mushy Monsters) with a multitude of flash games, but all their friends hang there, and the BIG problem is that the games are built around them NEEDING to be there to maintain their avatars more often than not, which undermines (read: DESTROYS) my ability to teach them to have a life alongside a game. So I passionately despise them and do my best to entice the kids with real games or non-gaming activities.
2. YOUTUBE. When they find the badger song, you're DONE. You can seek a good asylum at that point, and plan to come back when they're 35.
(ask me how I know).
3. Internet - I'm a believer in monitoring their usage rather than filtering it. Yes, there's a lot of nasty shit out there, and they're growing into a world where it's part of the backdrop they need to be able to contend with. From 4yo? You make that call with your own kids. I say might as well. If not at your place, they'll do it at their best mate's on a sleepover. It's not hard to find an unrestricted device nowadays. Any stuff I forbid will pull attention to itself, entice and pull them. If I don't, it'll just be "Yes, it's there, not a big deal, now where's the interesting stuff". .
Another thing that I found incredibly helpful (this was for the 7yo tho) - he got his computer in parts. He also got a paper with an OS matrix (with WinXP, Win7 and Linux), against their RAM requirements and gaming capabilities. And the CD/DVD for each. And I let them choose. Next project is to cut his wifi access on his PC, give him and old box and, if he wants networking, build his own linux wifi router.
As I share time on the first two kids with my ex-wife, they only live with me some of the time. I routinely pull bits (and break stuff) on my older son's computer, to train up his troubleshooting skills.
My 2 cents.
Not only a genious technologist, but one with enough grasp on geopolitics, business, consumer behavior and macro-economics to singlehandedly start a movement that would outflank the entire global automotive AND oil industries.
Search for him on Youtube if you haven't heard the name before.
That said, it's not something my second-grader son would be able to appreciate as much as he would, say, Carl Sagan. Maybe when he's a bit older. Or maybe he'll have his own heroes.
I guess it'd be a bit different as the world he would come to would already have EV's as a for-granted thing, and remember little of a time when they were all but "decades+ away, if ever, science fiction" and when one man standing up to that multi-trillion-industry entrenched dogma and methodically converting the world over (while founding a company that'll probably end up an order of magnitude or more bigger than google in a few years) with the charm and the wit he does it with... that's hero stuff right there :)
Ah. Thought you meant PV's on the car roof or some such.
My understanding is that renewable en-masse is indeed the plan.
They wanted to use PV in Israel, but I think they'll end up just burning CNG as a cleaner alternative to coal. I seem to recall something about the Israeli government not wanting to give them the land to do a national-sized PV farm.
Here in Australia I think they're mostly talking wind farms that AGL (a local utility that partnered with them) is throwing up, which is just as clean.
Another interesting bit of trivia is that in Denmark the local utility - DONG -dragged them in, because DONG makes >20% of their power from wind, most of which captured at night, and they end up paying the Germans to take it because they can't neither consume it nor store it.
With BPL they can build even more windmills, park the power in the national car fleet, then draw back on it during the day. Pretty amazing. BPL is nothing short of the holy grail to them.
And that ability to feed back in times of grid stress saves billions in reserve coal reactors that get fired up for 20 half-hours a year (some of these dollars will go straight back to BPL and allow them to ultimately charge us consumers less).
It's not about the quality of citations.
Better Place's business model needs to be understood wholistically to be appreciated for its disruptive power.
I can write 20 pages about it, or I can point you at youtube where there's ample talks by Agassi where he takes the time to run people through what he's doing.
You're wrong, on multiple accounts.
First off, charging a 22kWh car battery via photovoltaic is akin to filling the hoover dam with a drinking straw. It's can't be done. Check your physics.
Second, you charge the car from the grid, via a plug. Cars, on average, park 22 hours a day, and drive 2 hours a day. And it enables the smart grid operator (which is what Better Place is) to buy 100% renewable (essentially pick up as many long-term contracts for solar and/or wind as they need, taking the power whenever it's available, day or night, for the life of the turbine/solar farm), and save us burning coal.
You might say "It's expensive! Why would they?", but it actually makes perfect sense.
We consume miles, irrespective of how many gallons or Kilowatts it ends up. They sell miles. And if you look closely at what it costs them to sell you and me a mile, it's 5 parts lithium battery (which is they provide), and 1 part electricity. Buying more expensive "clean" electricity doesn't put a dent in their business model.
If all this is very new to you and you're asking what planet I just descended from, I suggest you go to Youtube, and see Shai Agassi present talks to anyone from the US congress, to Microsoft tech forums, TED, Berkeley think tanks, etc.
He raised 700Mil$ in the middle of a financial crisis, he's got 6 countries on the map with an A-Z model for country-wide EV adoption (from the right tax incentives, to supply of hundreds of thousands of electric cars already in production, to convincing every municipality and council to put charge spots and swap stations.
He's legit. Hawaii is on the map as well, and the US coasts are likely to follow in the not too distant future.
If anyone wants to Karma-whore, feel free to go get some YouTube links.
Let's connect the dots..... ... and this is not distant future. This is 60,000 presold vehicles in Israel today, and retail rollout in the upcoming 4 months....
China wants to drive.
They're adding more cars on the road a year than the US and Europe combined (~2-3mil/year national car parc growth)
Chery, their biggest independent car maker, has signed a deal with Better Place. They're almost completely leapfrogging the Internal Combustion Engine altogether. Beijin's mayor deputy has visited Better Place in Israel multiple times.
Right now, anyone who ignores what the hybrid-entrenched car companies (Read: Toyota, Chevrolet, Honda) are saying and has his ear to the ground knows one thing:
Once an electric car stops being a greenie status symbol 10K$ more expensive than an ICE car, and starts being 10K$ cheaper than an ICE car (which is what the Better Place model does), Multi-Trillion-Dollar-Industry (Oil and Automotive combined) undergoes BIG disruption happens. All hell breaks loose.
Priuses have moved in production from 10,000car/anum to 100,000car/anum.
Renault, on the other hand, the boldest pure-EV company (and Better Place's biggest partner), just geared up for a 1,000,000car/anum production in Turkey. They know one thing: When Better Place starts running cross-subsidy ("Free iPhone on a 3-year-plan") on a car that's 10K$ car cheaper (batteries not included), subsidized by government to the tune of another 5K$-10K$, and is 5K$ cheaper than hybrid/ice because there is no ICE, and starts giving away cars for free...
Then Renault doesn't have a demand problem like Toyota do. They have a supply problem. It becomes a question of how many cars you can hand out for free.
All the big players - namely countries - know this. It's no secret, and Shai Agassi is all over YouTube like a rash. Everyone is watching Israel, Denmark and Australia very closely.
This is why Japan, China, Europe and the US have dumped 4 BIL$ into car battery production, when nobody is actually producing anywhere near this many cars yet.
By 2015-2016, there will be more electric cars sold than ICE ones.
And in the middle of it is the one technology pretty much all the big car players have agreed on - Lithium Ion. Afghanistan and Bolivia, large as their stash may be, is not happening anytime soon.
It'll be Argentina & Chile's salt flats, slightly more expensive Lithium from spodumene ore in Australia, China (and to lesser extent North America and some other locations in the world), and for countries that are willing to pay premium for national security and divorcing workforce driving to work from import dependence like Korea - production from ocean seawater.
China is concerned wants to make sure it's lithium needs are served before everything else.
This development is anything but surprising.
Maybe, but it won't happen in the foreseeable future. We'll be mining it from the ocean before we'll be mining Afghanistan.
RMA=big, ugly time drain.
Turf the defective parts and factor in a spares pile. (Or let your techie take them home and RMA them on his own time). He'll love you for it (tho he may get tempted to lie to you).
Most parts that go faulty (business mobos, RAM, drives) are a dime a dozen and human time in the developed world is not.
'200 fart apps' is a side-effect of a huge creative force called a non-restricted (or nearly-unrestricted) army of free developers.
Sure, they do what the market wants, rather than what RIM's CEO deems is of a personal opinion could be useful.
pro: huge app base, huge choice of vendor for the same kind of app, unique idea apps (turn iPhone screen into a break light for a bicycle? etc etc).
con: fart apps. Seriously, big whoop.
They go in a tight package. Ask Linus. Ask Bill. Ask Steve.
RIM is not a platform for any 3rd party software dev that isn't actively being paid by RIM. It's not a platform - it's a standalone niche product.
The con might give your platform -1, but the pro gives it +100.
Which is why RIM will never crawl out of its corporate niche.
PS
Had a bb from work for 2 years. Now have i
Bussard claimed that what a Tokomak can do, an infinitely cheaper Polywell device can do better, with no radiation or hazard (on top of power produced). In a form factor small enough to fit on a medium yacht.
His research was under wraps for a long time (the Navy wanted this to power their big boats), then they cut off his budget, and he did one last act of a man who had very little left to live - he got in front of a Yahoo and Google tech forum, handed out everything he worked out in the last 15 years on handouts to anyone who'd take them from him, did a ~1 hour braindump that got put on the interwebs, and promptly kicked the bucket soon after.
Is it feasible? Energetically? Financially?
Quite possibly yes. No reason to get excited yet, but his company will tell us in a year or two. They're now financed by -someone- (maybe google or yahoo as these organisations had interest in clean containable ways to power datacenters and have been actively approached for this financing), and emc2fusion will likely get busy building a full-scale energy-positive POC in the next few years.
If they turn out to be right, this is BIG . And it's career-changing if you work on a tokamak project - this will cheapen power by an order of magnitude, allow contained powerplants in very small form factors, and generally end up being the biggest disruption the energy market has ever seen. Nothing to get excited over.
If it pans out, the French will end up wearing their new tokamak (an uberexpensive adventure, as tokamaks go) in a less than complementary way. I'm surprised they didn't wait.
>> using sweet fuck all sustainable power
Wrong.
2012-2013. Better Place rolls out all of the east coast. ... and powered of 100% renewable energy... ... which, due to the distributed-battery-nature and smart-charging-grid/ERGO(=EV equivalent of a cellular network operator), becomes the first-ever national-scale distributed-battery-cache to cache up spare-dirty/renewable power generated at night(wind) or when the sun is out (solar), when it's cheap, and put it back into the grid when it's expensive... ... so BPL to purchase many many many long-term, all-you-can-produce, whenever-you-can-produce-it renewable power-generation contracts (= wind mills, solar farms)... ... making available "30% of my home power comes from clean" and "40% of my home power comes from clean" deals with your utilities, where "15% of my home power comes from clean" exists today... ... and there is so much margin in selling us our weekly dose of kilometers this way, that what we term today our "fuel budget" is enough to not only drive us the distance, it's enough to cross-subsidize, in part or in full, the car itself (read: Subscribe for the 69$ Mobile Phone plan for 3 years and get a free 1000$ iphone, in this case "Sign up for 24,000km a year plan and get a free family sedan)"...
Read:
[a] Most of the national car fleet off oil in 10 years...
[b]
[c]
[d]
[e]
[f]
[g]... yes, there is enough margin in there to allow them to do it. In Israel, they've pre-sold enough to be profitable from day 1. Crazy.
This is happening, in Australia, in the next 3 years, with full support of the newly-elected labor government, right after Better Place get their Israel and Denmark deployments rolling (happening in 2011 and 2012).
Good times...
Relax. ... now he won't even be able to pass it in the house to begin with - the libs and independents are officially opposed to the filter, and even if every member of labour will vote in favor, he doesn't have enough for a "think of the children" bill.
Conroy isn't in a position to do anything, not only is there a Greens majority in the senate that'll mercilessly machine-gun the whole scheme down if it ever gets that far...
And once everyone has an interwebs pipe as wide as the simpson desert for his last-mile and we start chewing up the UECOMM cross-pacific fiber bundle, the cost of implementing a filter will skyrocket even higher than it already is.
Filter's dead for the foreseeable future.
Rejoyce.
Yep. We got just the -precisely- well balanced minority government, to
a. get a NO to get the filter shot down, not only in the senate where it would have been shot down anyway, but in the house of reps as well.
b. get a YES on the NBN.
c. get Better Place in (who were stamped all over the Labor's promised intentions in all but name, and who already landed access to ~100M$ of govt money in NSW) and thoroughly funded via some serious consumer-enticing EV-adoption tax breaks I suspect are coming circa 2012-2013..
We couldn't have dreamed of a better outcome.
We'll get the NBN and the EV fleet, then swing over to the liberals for a term or two, to clean up the financial mess that the above will have created, as we drive EVs to work or work from home at Gbps speeds to pay for it.
Salut.
>> Not clear how one 'infringes' on such a patent
One doesn't.
>> it's not clear why anyone's patenting this either.
1. Town gets headlines.
2. Town become famous.
3. Tourists come.
4. Residents have a new source of income.
Ain't rocket science, dude.
>> Out of the box quite satisfactory but nothing special compared to HTC and the other smart phones.
Ummm... hate to break in on your happy la-la dance with cold hard reality, but:
If Exhibit A is the iPhone 4, it did not go into a world with no apps. It had 3 generations of compatible iOS apps to build on.
If Exhibit A is the iPhone 1 doing its 2007 debut into a no-apps-written-yet ecosystem, then it had a very big advantage on the HTC devices: It beat them to market by 3 years!! and arguably spawned the idea of creating them (where them is large-screen finger-driven UI devices) in the first place.
I can Karma-Whore and google for you, but you'll need to do the actual reading:
GP's Point 1 - http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/iran-inks-deal-to-send-enriched-uranium-to-turkey-20100517-v8uc.html /. post.
GP's Point 2 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaiMjAULWn0&feature=player_embedded#!
http://libertypundits.net/article/paid-mercenaries-on-turkish-flotilla-ship-and-more-censored-footage-of-violence/
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/turkish-paper-releases-censored-photos-of-beaten-israeli-commandos-1.294443
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_O'Keefe
http://trueslant.com/charlesjohnson/2010/06/06/another-cropped-reuters-photo-deletes-another-knife-and-a-pool-of-blood/
GP's Point 3 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Turkey_relations
GP's Point 4 - http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/columnists-164310-turkey-hamas-relations.html
GP's Point 5 - RTFA, what we're discussing in this
If you don't see Turkish Islamist policy driving this and the bigger picture this fits into (radical Islam, oppressive regimes vs new-internet-driven-world-order, middle-east mentality and its differences from western mentality, arab nation politics, Turkey's NATO/european membership, Turkish internal right-left struggle and dirty laundry, Turkish history (murder/slaughter of 1,000,000 armenians last decade, try mentioning that on Turkish media), you're just another one of those people who just can't get geopolitics and need an oversimplified model - namely, a little demonizing circle drawn around one of the participants of an equation (typically ends being one of Iran, Al-qaeda, USA, Israel, George W, etc) with an "evil" sign pointed at it. If only the world were that simple. Fox and Al-jazeera do it equally well, depending on direction the guys with the remote wants the arrow pointed in.
I have a demonizing-circle detector. Every time I get someone draw me one (whether Erdogan from Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu from Israel, Ismail Hanniyeh from Hammas, Al Jazeera or Fox, I immediately know I'm being told a half-truth. Big problems don't fit in little circles, and the root causes are way more complex and way more distributed.
If complexity can be equated to pain with people who can't grasp it, I'll invoke the following:
"Life is pain, your highness. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something."
We hear and obey, Oh Other Steve who does not give us root on our own hardware either.
>> Ads on mobile phone? DO NOT WANT.
YES WE DO. iAd is GOOD
Two reasons:
The minor one: More free apps on the store as app-writers will be able to live off the ad revenue.
The major one: Right now, every other app implements its own ads mechanism.
Nobody's gonna sit and de-ad all them 0.99$ apps.
Enter iAd - a central OS-level facility to deliver ads. That's excellent. It's a single point of failure.
Couple that with root access that allows you to modify any file on the system (that's a jailbreak, to the unix-uninitiated), and that spells one single place you need to jam a spanner (a cydia app that'll pro'lly boil up on Cydia inside 3.2 minutes from the iAd launch) and all ads in all your apps will just -go-.
Go iAD!
>> Microsoft Claims Google Chrome Steals Your Privacy ... ... ... From Microsoft; who firmly believe they rightly own it.
I can imagine employers who'd want to hire this kind of .. erm.. "Talent".
I can't imagine wanting to work for said employers.