So the patent should be on that method. "Based on the determined error" is how every single control system in the universe* works. In fact, claim 23 says "determine the error by comparing images," which is still a "what" and is an obvious "what"; if they want a patent then patent the method they use to compare the images, not stating that they are going to compare them.
While I agree that often people don't actually look at the claims in a patent, this patent still doesn't claim any "how" but merely "what." In fact, even if you go to claims 24-26, you just see a calibration procedure that anyone would know: "put all the mirrors in the desired position to get the reference image, then move them to another position to get a reference undesired position."
There is nothing novel in this particular application, and it makes me ill to think that just because it's Google it will probably get approved.
*This is not the hyperbole for which you are looking.
all patent are not evil and this is exactly the kind of patent that the system was designed to encourage.
Except that if you read the patent application, it should be shot down. The patent essentially claims "use a camera protected from heat and some image processing software to feed a control system with inputs to control heliostat mirrors to get an optimal image."
There is absolutely nothing novel about that concept, unless they are using a novel method of image processing (which the claims do not appear to indicate; they talk about "measuring bright spots" which is all a camera can do in the first place) or a novel method of keeping the camera cool (which the claims also do not indicate).
Linking image processing to a control system has already been done, and just because it hasn't been done "for a heliostat" doesn't make it novel. So I would argue that this is indeed just the type of patent that should not be allowed.
All this boils down to the fundamental economic and social question of the cost of a life.
In modern society, in "developed" countries, people seem to be placing an extremely high value on life. The cost of a life should not be "infinite" which is the direction in which we appear to be going. Is a life worth sacrificing freedom? Is it worth spending $5 million in medical bills to treat some condition? Is it worth sacrificing standard of living?
Not to sound coarse, but only a mere 100 years ago in the US, if you had an infant or child die, you were sad for a while but then just tried to have more kids. If an elderly person fell ill, you just appreciated them and helped them depart gracefully. Today, people are for some reason willing to spend several liftetimes' income to preserve a single person (doesn't matter how old they are) for even very small increments of time.
The "safety" card is often used to justify numerous technologies that have very high cost for very small marginal benefit.
That has never been the point of copyright. The point has always been to set up a system whereby creation can be incentivized - which works wonderfully well.
This philosophy makes me sad. Not because it's wrong, or because it's right, but because it indicates that people think the most compelling reason to do something is because of monetary or other material gain.
(I would argue that we would have just the same, if not more, cultural and technical innovation if we had much weaker copyright and patent systems, because people would actually have to work hard to produce things of extraordinary value in order to gain from them.)
Ok, I've seen this enough now that I have to point out that the US federal gasoline tax is an excise tax: fixed amount per unit sold. It's not a value tax like sales tax. The government actually makes less from gasoline taxes now than it used to, because demand has been waning (and they haven't been increasing the tax in line with inflation). Fewer gallons sold means less income, not more.
I think people made some assumptions by what I meant by "coexisting diversity". I was not advocating the creation of cartels (which is a form of cooperation, but is not really beneficial). There are most definitely forms of positive cooperation.
An important point is that "coexisting diversity" is not mutually exclusive to "competition."
Perhaps a helpful addendum is "not all competition is created equal." I agree that product differentiation (based on features) is "good" competition. But once competition starts involving things other than features things get more complicated. Price competition, for instance, is very insidious because while it has short term benefit for consumers, the long term effects can be detrimental if the price was lowered at the expense of quality, sustainability, or relocation of employment.
Competition = Good.
It gives us customers a better chance to finally get what we want!
Deliberate somewhat off-topic de-rail:
Not all competition is beneficial. In fact, in the general case, competition generally means that the stronger or more cunning party succeeds, not the better party. For instance: I do not want to have to compete with other people for my food.
A better phrase is probably "Coexisting Diversity = Good." Take Coke and Pepsi (or a car analogy: GM and Toyota): it is better for society to have both of these than to have just one, because people who prefer the taste of either product are satisfied. If one company "wins the competition" and puts the other out of business, then the people who preferred the "loser" suffer real loss. Also, resources spent competing are probably always better spent cooperating instead.
So for all the people wanting [platform X] to win: be careful for what you wish.
Patent protection is valid even if you are not the most qualified or successful at implementing your ideas. indeed that's the point. it is supposed to stifle the competition so that you can be completive yourself or force them to pay you.
And this is the fatal flaw of patents: patents, which should ideally be a net benefit to society, instead are proving to carry with them a real, measurable loss function. If the patent holder is not the best implementer, then society suffers because the cost to society for the better implementations is higher than it would be without the protection. This is especially true in fast-moving fields like software where by the time a patent expires the technology is obsolete; the benefit society should have reaped from the invention is reduced and/or delayed due to patents.
Yes, there are always counterexamples where some Large Company abuses a relationship with some individual and "steals their idea." But, as a society, we have to ultimately ask ourselves, just how much protection should an individual have at society's expense? That, however, is not really a question appropriate to patent discussions.
It's not that the ribbon is a new UI to learn. It's that they changed other fundamental things. For instance, a big pet peeve of mine: you used to be able to double-click the axis of a graph to pull up the axis properties dialog; now this doesn't work and you *must* right click and select a menu option (or navigate to the ribbon). Also, the tab stops in the new dialog don't work the way they used to, increasing the number of key-transitions required to change the axis dimensions. This is a real pain for those of us who were forced to use Excel for technical things.
My car has a pretty good coefficient of drag, and I'm hard pressed to ever get it out of the 31-32MPG range. If I really drive aggressively I can get 30MPG.
Exactly: a low-drag car will be less sensitive to speed changes than a high-drag car.
So issue people that have low coefficient of drag cars stickers that let them drive 80MPH on the freeway. There's no safety concern, and as I found, there's no fuel efficiency reason either.
Personally, I wish the EPA fuel economy sticker was a plot of instantaneous fuel economy on level ground with no wind versus speed, rather than a silly single number that never matches how any particular person drives. You could also include factors for "expect x% decrease for each 5mph headwind" or "y% decrease for each % grade", factors for A/C, factors for weather conditions (drag is more than 10% greater at -10C than it is at +25C if barometric pressure is constant). Unfortunately, I don't think a majority of the driving population would understand such information though.
This is definitely key, and it depends strongly on the particular vehicle in question. Given your numbers, I would say that either you car is very inefficient at low speeds, its total drag is dominated by driveline losses rather than wind resistance (this is the case for aerodynamic vehicles), or your engine is less efficient at lower powers.
Try the same thing in a truck or SUV though; I'm fairly certain that an SUV driving 75 is burning far more fuel than it would doing 65.
Remember, one data point doesn't make a trend, and I'd stand by my assertion that, in aggregate, total fuel usage would be far less if people drove lower speeds on the highway, because most people are driving high-drag vehicles (SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks). If everyone was driving an aerodynamic sedan or small car, then yes, speed would not matter so much.
...and therefore, should not even be legally enforceable in the first place.
As long as that limit is set sensibly, I don't have a problem with that.
I half agree here. Yes, it's annoying when speed limits are set artificially low; for instance, if a road "naturally" allows you to go 35 or 40 mph, but the limit is set to 25mph simply to generate revenue. I don't have a problem with highway speed limits though, and I think they should be enforced much more rigorously; there is a huge societal externality in the form of oil usage with high highway speeds. If every state had a 65mph highway speed limit and enforced it, gasoline usage would drop by millions of barrels of gasoline a day*. Yes, there's a tradeoff with time spent traveling, but if energy independence is important, use the tools that already exist! (yes, ok, that was a bit of a rant..)
Back on topic: a law is a law; if you are going to argue that you shouldn't enforce laws, or it's "ok to go 5mph over the speed limit" then I'm just going to casually take $5 out of your wallet; after all it's "only" $5. Or, perhaps I'll only beat you slightly more than zero times.
The solution to an inappropriate law is to change the law, not disobey it; society cannot stand if people just ignore laws rather than use the appropriate mechanism to change them. I am not surprised that our country in general is in the state it's in when the vast majority of the population has no problem violating laws every single day without even a modicum of remorse. When people feel free to ignore some laws, they feel free to ignore more over time.
*Gory math: take a car that gets 28mpg at 65 but 25 at 70. Over 100 miles, this saves 0.43 gallons at the cost of 5.4 minutes (which costs more - the oil or the time? Apparently people still feel that time is worth more than oil). 100 cars slowing down saves a barrel of oil (43 is close enough to 44 for estimating purposes). It's probably safe to say that there are at least 100 million car-miles traveled per day on US highways, which would be around a million barrels. If you're an environmentalist, it's philosophically inconsistent to exceed highway speed limits. I always smile at the irony of a Prius driving 75mph on the highway (yes, it's probably getting better economy than my vehicle, but it's getting nowhere close to its optimum; there is therefore a real loss to society in terms of fuel used).
Running (very) lean-of-peak does indeed reduce combustion temperature greatly, but it also reduces power and fuel economy. Best economy is just lean of peak temperature, which is going to be worst case for NOx (and things like detonation, valves, turbochargers, etc. which tend to have adverse reaction to high temperatures). Once you start leaning enough to bring the temperatures down, you end up with reduced economy, not improved.
I think the GP is correct actually; it's not "fair". "Fair" would be if a product cost the same no matter where it was produced.
The problem is that, fundamentally, workers in some countries simply demand far less in exchange for their labor than in other countries. In the US, people demand food, clothing, a car (or two or three), single-family dwellings, entertainment, health care, and some kind of retirement savings in exchange for their labor. In other countries, workers are happy to exchange all their labor for only food, clothing, and an apartment. You can't force people to buy more than they want; even if you give them cash they may just sit on it (just look at the US bank bailout; the banks were given all sorts of cash, but they didn't "buy" anything with it (no increase in loans offered).
The other problem is that people are happy to pay for the lower-priced goods, but they forget that unless they are doing something for which other people will continue paying more, the folks with higher demands will tend to lose their ability to maintain their high level of demands.
Mathematically, the population requiring the lowest pay will always be able to stress the population demanding more pay. Note that this is different from things like slavery which artificially hold prices low (or its complement, forcing prices to be high); this is just the natural willingness to be content with less.
What does that article even mean? What does "having the right to a standard of living mean?" I think it means "you can't be actively prevented from obtaining it", not "someone should be forced to give it to you if you don't have it."
Those are dramatically different statements, and the distinction between them is of great importance.
Isp of 850 or so from NERVA is good, but a factor of two probably won't be revolutionary enough to get through the political quagmire surrounding "nuclear."
The nuclear salt-water rockets, which (theoretically) get the 10000 Isp with MN thrust capability, could not be utilized as heavy-lift. You can't have your main-lift rocket producing radioactive salt water as its exhaust stream (same reason you can't use liquid fluorine as the oxidizer for LH2, even though it has a much better Isp than LO2: HF as an exhaust product is really not fun). This would work for deep-space travel, but you really have to get to LEO first, and the ability to either put lots of fuel up there or have some in-space means to collect that fuel. While possible, this is by no means a foregone conclusion.
At what specific impulse? You still have to have enough propellant to eject for the momentum exchange...and this is the killer: you have to carry extra mass around in order to change your velocity.
I agree with the tall claims on efficiency gain: the article states that current ICEs only get 15% thermal efficiency, which is only true at certain operating conditions. In cruise, a modern ICE can get better than 30%. Unfortunately, press releases are always short on technical details.
That said, the video has more detail, but what's interesting is it's not claiming higher engine efficiency so much as higher system efficiency: in fact, much like a turbine it sounds like this engine has very poor efficiency at any point off-design (which is why it only works in a hybrid system). The video also states that the goal is 25kW which is "sufficient for any vehicle" which is questionable; even with a battery pack to provide extra power for high load conditions, 25kW is not really that much excess over what most common (US size, at least) vehicles need to sustain highway speeds due to drag; to recharge batteries to provide more power for acceleration and hill climb, I'd think you'd significantly more margin than can be provided by 25kW. For a small, light vehicle, though, 25kW is probably reasonable.
In all, it sounds like a very nice concept, and hopefully it's something that lends itself to mobile installations rather than just stationary ones. Basically, "It's a whole lot harder to bring a concept to mass production than you think."
Well, this is a patent for a physical machine, so the patent is probably on the mechanism they used to concentrate the light, rather than the idea "shine light in people's eyes to stun them." "Device" patents tend to be a lot more reasonable than software patents.
I'm not disputing the range here at all; I'm saying that for a 60-mile round-trip at cruise speeds of 70mph, a recharge would require around 20kW-hr. That energy needs to come from somewhere, and the increased electrical demand to provide that energy is going to drive energy prices higher.
As evidenced by recent history, technological developments in electricity production have not kept up with demand, which is part of why electricity prices keep rising. (Part of the price increase is indeed due to commodity prices, but if technology could shift production to other means fast enough, the price would be stable or dropping due to substitution; technology is not "substituting" fast enough, so this results in upward price pressure.)
All they had to do is run a disclaimer saying "The car really didn't break down like we pretended" and it would be OK.
You know, I'm not even that old, and I seem to recall that an important part of my upbringing was learning the ability to look at any information presented to me and make an evaluation of the merit of that information.
When you have a society that relies on disclaimers to tell them what is fact, fiction, or opinion, that society is in big trouble: once disclaimers have all the trust, you can make society believe anything "just because it said so in the disclaimer/citation."
If everyone charges their cars at night, it's not going to be "off-peak" any more.
Also, electrical vehicles only make sense for very short commutes - in my metro area (Detroit) a typical commute is 30 miles on the highway, and our highways actually allow traveling close to the posted speeds of 70mph. A typical vehicle is going to dissipate something like 10-15kW at 70mph; over half an hour, that's about 5-8 kW-hr, one-way. So the round trip would use 10-20kW-hr (rounded for simplicity) per day.
To put that in perspective, that's roughly equivalent to the "standard" household baseload usage per day. Night-time charging is now going to have consumption pretty constant through the day; there will be no peak, and national electricity consumption would increase dramatically. Yes, the wires may be able to handle the load assuming everyone only charges at night, but how many people will charge during the day, thus making peak demands worse? If there is no "off-peak" time any more, how much will this increase electricity prices?
I think it's naive to assume that electricity prices will remain constant if we switch to electric vehicles. Yes, we'll pay less for gasoline, but I suspect that we'll end up paying the same total amount anyway because electricity prices will rise (especially since we have recently had our choices for increasing electricity production limited).
Slashdot Mirror
So the patent should be on that method. "Based on the determined error" is how every single control system in the universe* works. In fact, claim 23 says "determine the error by comparing images," which is still a "what" and is an obvious "what"; if they want a patent then patent the method they use to compare the images, not stating that they are going to compare them.
While I agree that often people don't actually look at the claims in a patent, this patent still doesn't claim any "how" but merely "what." In fact, even if you go to claims 24-26, you just see a calibration procedure that anyone would know: "put all the mirrors in the desired position to get the reference image, then move them to another position to get a reference undesired position."
There is nothing novel in this particular application, and it makes me ill to think that just because it's Google it will probably get approved.
*This is not the hyperbole for which you are looking.
Except that if you read the patent application, it should be shot down. The patent essentially claims "use a camera protected from heat and some image processing software to feed a control system with inputs to control heliostat mirrors to get an optimal image."
There is absolutely nothing novel about that concept, unless they are using a novel method of image processing (which the claims do not appear to indicate; they talk about "measuring bright spots" which is all a camera can do in the first place) or a novel method of keeping the camera cool (which the claims also do not indicate).
Linking image processing to a control system has already been done, and just because it hasn't been done "for a heliostat" doesn't make it novel. So I would argue that this is indeed just the type of patent that should not be allowed.
All this boils down to the fundamental economic and social question of the cost of a life.
In modern society, in "developed" countries, people seem to be placing an extremely high value on life. The cost of a life should not be "infinite" which is the direction in which we appear to be going. Is a life worth sacrificing freedom? Is it worth spending $5 million in medical bills to treat some condition? Is it worth sacrificing standard of living?
Not to sound coarse, but only a mere 100 years ago in the US, if you had an infant or child die, you were sad for a while but then just tried to have more kids. If an elderly person fell ill, you just appreciated them and helped them depart gracefully. Today, people are for some reason willing to spend several liftetimes' income to preserve a single person (doesn't matter how old they are) for even very small increments of time.
The "safety" card is often used to justify numerous technologies that have very high cost for very small marginal benefit.
This philosophy makes me sad. Not because it's wrong, or because it's right, but because it indicates that people think the most compelling reason to do something is because of monetary or other material gain.
(I would argue that we would have just the same, if not more, cultural and technical innovation if we had much weaker copyright and patent systems, because people would actually have to work hard to produce things of extraordinary value in order to gain from them.)
Ok, I've seen this enough now that I have to point out that the US federal gasoline tax is an excise tax: fixed amount per unit sold. It's not a value tax like sales tax. The government actually makes less from gasoline taxes now than it used to, because demand has been waning (and they haven't been increasing the tax in line with inflation). Fewer gallons sold means less income, not more.
I think people made some assumptions by what I meant by "coexisting diversity". I was not advocating the creation of cartels (which is a form of cooperation, but is not really beneficial). There are most definitely forms of positive cooperation.
An important point is that "coexisting diversity" is not mutually exclusive to "competition."
Perhaps a helpful addendum is "not all competition is created equal." I agree that product differentiation (based on features) is "good" competition. But once competition starts involving things other than features things get more complicated. Price competition, for instance, is very insidious because while it has short term benefit for consumers, the long term effects can be detrimental if the price was lowered at the expense of quality, sustainability, or relocation of employment.
Deliberate somewhat off-topic de-rail:
Not all competition is beneficial. In fact, in the general case, competition generally means that the stronger or more cunning party succeeds, not the better party. For instance: I do not want to have to compete with other people for my food.
A better phrase is probably "Coexisting Diversity = Good." Take Coke and Pepsi (or a car analogy: GM and Toyota): it is better for society to have both of these than to have just one, because people who prefer the taste of either product are satisfied. If one company "wins the competition" and puts the other out of business, then the people who preferred the "loser" suffer real loss. Also, resources spent competing are probably always better spent cooperating instead.
So for all the people wanting [platform X] to win: be careful for what you wish.
And this is the fatal flaw of patents: patents, which should ideally be a net benefit to society, instead are proving to carry with them a real, measurable loss function. If the patent holder is not the best implementer, then society suffers because the cost to society for the better implementations is higher than it would be without the protection. This is especially true in fast-moving fields like software where by the time a patent expires the technology is obsolete; the benefit society should have reaped from the invention is reduced and/or delayed due to patents.
Yes, there are always counterexamples where some Large Company abuses a relationship with some individual and "steals their idea." But, as a society, we have to ultimately ask ourselves, just how much protection should an individual have at society's expense? That, however, is not really a question appropriate to patent discussions.
They must have fixed it in 2010; my company *just* upgraded us to 2007. (And, of course, we're still using XP.)
It's not that the ribbon is a new UI to learn. It's that they changed other fundamental things. For instance, a big pet peeve of mine: you used to be able to double-click the axis of a graph to pull up the axis properties dialog; now this doesn't work and you *must* right click and select a menu option (or navigate to the ribbon). Also, the tab stops in the new dialog don't work the way they used to, increasing the number of key-transitions required to change the axis dimensions. This is a real pain for those of us who were forced to use Excel for technical things.
Exactly: a low-drag car will be less sensitive to speed changes than a high-drag car.
Personally, I wish the EPA fuel economy sticker was a plot of instantaneous fuel economy on level ground with no wind versus speed, rather than a silly single number that never matches how any particular person drives. You could also include factors for "expect x% decrease for each 5mph headwind" or "y% decrease for each % grade", factors for A/C, factors for weather conditions (drag is more than 10% greater at -10C than it is at +25C if barometric pressure is constant). Unfortunately, I don't think a majority of the driving population would understand such information though.
This is definitely key, and it depends strongly on the particular vehicle in question. Given your numbers, I would say that either you car is very inefficient at low speeds, its total drag is dominated by driveline losses rather than wind resistance (this is the case for aerodynamic vehicles), or your engine is less efficient at lower powers.
Try the same thing in a truck or SUV though; I'm fairly certain that an SUV driving 75 is burning far more fuel than it would doing 65.
Remember, one data point doesn't make a trend, and I'd stand by my assertion that, in aggregate, total fuel usage would be far less if people drove lower speeds on the highway, because most people are driving high-drag vehicles (SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks). If everyone was driving an aerodynamic sedan or small car, then yes, speed would not matter so much.
I half agree here. Yes, it's annoying when speed limits are set artificially low; for instance, if a road "naturally" allows you to go 35 or 40 mph, but the limit is set to 25mph simply to generate revenue. I don't have a problem with highway speed limits though, and I think they should be enforced much more rigorously; there is a huge societal externality in the form of oil usage with high highway speeds. If every state had a 65mph highway speed limit and enforced it, gasoline usage would drop by millions of barrels of gasoline a day*. Yes, there's a tradeoff with time spent traveling, but if energy independence is important, use the tools that already exist! (yes, ok, that was a bit of a rant..)
Back on topic: a law is a law; if you are going to argue that you shouldn't enforce laws, or it's "ok to go 5mph over the speed limit" then I'm just going to casually take $5 out of your wallet; after all it's "only" $5. Or, perhaps I'll only beat you slightly more than zero times.
The solution to an inappropriate law is to change the law, not disobey it; society cannot stand if people just ignore laws rather than use the appropriate mechanism to change them. I am not surprised that our country in general is in the state it's in when the vast majority of the population has no problem violating laws every single day without even a modicum of remorse. When people feel free to ignore some laws, they feel free to ignore more over time.
*Gory math: take a car that gets 28mpg at 65 but 25 at 70. Over 100 miles, this saves 0.43 gallons at the cost of 5.4 minutes (which costs more - the oil or the time? Apparently people still feel that time is worth more than oil). 100 cars slowing down saves a barrel of oil (43 is close enough to 44 for estimating purposes). It's probably safe to say that there are at least 100 million car-miles traveled per day on US highways, which would be around a million barrels. If you're an environmentalist, it's philosophically inconsistent to exceed highway speed limits. I always smile at the irony of a Prius driving 75mph on the highway (yes, it's probably getting better economy than my vehicle, but it's getting nowhere close to its optimum; there is therefore a real loss to society in terms of fuel used).
Not always. It's much easier to cut something in half than it is to cut it into tenths.
Running (very) lean-of-peak does indeed reduce combustion temperature greatly, but it also reduces power and fuel economy. Best economy is just lean of peak temperature, which is going to be worst case for NOx (and things like detonation, valves, turbochargers, etc. which tend to have adverse reaction to high temperatures). Once you start leaning enough to bring the temperatures down, you end up with reduced economy, not improved.
I think the GP is correct actually; it's not "fair". "Fair" would be if a product cost the same no matter where it was produced.
The problem is that, fundamentally, workers in some countries simply demand far less in exchange for their labor than in other countries. In the US, people demand food, clothing, a car (or two or three), single-family dwellings, entertainment, health care, and some kind of retirement savings in exchange for their labor. In other countries, workers are happy to exchange all their labor for only food, clothing, and an apartment. You can't force people to buy more than they want; even if you give them cash they may just sit on it (just look at the US bank bailout; the banks were given all sorts of cash, but they didn't "buy" anything with it (no increase in loans offered).
The other problem is that people are happy to pay for the lower-priced goods, but they forget that unless they are doing something for which other people will continue paying more, the folks with higher demands will tend to lose their ability to maintain their high level of demands.
Mathematically, the population requiring the lowest pay will always be able to stress the population demanding more pay. Note that this is different from things like slavery which artificially hold prices low (or its complement, forcing prices to be high); this is just the natural willingness to be content with less.
What does that article even mean? What does "having the right to a standard of living mean?" I think it means "you can't be actively prevented from obtaining it", not "someone should be forced to give it to you if you don't have it."
Those are dramatically different statements, and the distinction between them is of great importance.
Isp of 850 or so from NERVA is good, but a factor of two probably won't be revolutionary enough to get through the political quagmire surrounding "nuclear."
The nuclear salt-water rockets, which (theoretically) get the 10000 Isp with MN thrust capability, could not be utilized as heavy-lift. You can't have your main-lift rocket producing radioactive salt water as its exhaust stream (same reason you can't use liquid fluorine as the oxidizer for LH2, even though it has a much better Isp than LO2: HF as an exhaust product is really not fun). This would work for deep-space travel, but you really have to get to LEO first, and the ability to either put lots of fuel up there or have some in-space means to collect that fuel. While possible, this is by no means a foregone conclusion.
At what specific impulse? You still have to have enough propellant to eject for the momentum exchange...and this is the killer: you have to carry extra mass around in order to change your velocity.
I agree with the tall claims on efficiency gain: the article states that current ICEs only get 15% thermal efficiency, which is only true at certain operating conditions. In cruise, a modern ICE can get better than 30%. Unfortunately, press releases are always short on technical details.
That said, the video has more detail, but what's interesting is it's not claiming higher engine efficiency so much as higher system efficiency: in fact, much like a turbine it sounds like this engine has very poor efficiency at any point off-design (which is why it only works in a hybrid system). The video also states that the goal is 25kW which is "sufficient for any vehicle" which is questionable; even with a battery pack to provide extra power for high load conditions, 25kW is not really that much excess over what most common (US size, at least) vehicles need to sustain highway speeds due to drag; to recharge batteries to provide more power for acceleration and hill climb, I'd think you'd significantly more margin than can be provided by 25kW. For a small, light vehicle, though, 25kW is probably reasonable.
In all, it sounds like a very nice concept, and hopefully it's something that lends itself to mobile installations rather than just stationary ones. Basically, "It's a whole lot harder to bring a concept to mass production than you think."
I think you forgot the one core to rule them all...
Well, this is a patent for a physical machine, so the patent is probably on the mechanism they used to concentrate the light, rather than the idea "shine light in people's eyes to stun them." "Device" patents tend to be a lot more reasonable than software patents.
I'm not disputing the range here at all; I'm saying that for a 60-mile round-trip at cruise speeds of 70mph, a recharge would require around 20kW-hr. That energy needs to come from somewhere, and the increased electrical demand to provide that energy is going to drive energy prices higher.
As evidenced by recent history, technological developments in electricity production have not kept up with demand, which is part of why electricity prices keep rising. (Part of the price increase is indeed due to commodity prices, but if technology could shift production to other means fast enough, the price would be stable or dropping due to substitution; technology is not "substituting" fast enough, so this results in upward price pressure.)
You know, I'm not even that old, and I seem to recall that an important part of my upbringing was learning the ability to look at any information presented to me and make an evaluation of the merit of that information.
When you have a society that relies on disclaimers to tell them what is fact, fiction, or opinion, that society is in big trouble: once disclaimers have all the trust, you can make society believe anything "just because it said so in the disclaimer/citation."
If everyone charges their cars at night, it's not going to be "off-peak" any more.
Also, electrical vehicles only make sense for very short commutes - in my metro area (Detroit) a typical commute is 30 miles on the highway, and our highways actually allow traveling close to the posted speeds of 70mph. A typical vehicle is going to dissipate something like 10-15kW at 70mph; over half an hour, that's about 5-8 kW-hr, one-way. So the round trip would use 10-20kW-hr (rounded for simplicity) per day.
To put that in perspective, that's roughly equivalent to the "standard" household baseload usage per day. Night-time charging is now going to have consumption pretty constant through the day; there will be no peak, and national electricity consumption would increase dramatically. Yes, the wires may be able to handle the load assuming everyone only charges at night, but how many people will charge during the day, thus making peak demands worse? If there is no "off-peak" time any more, how much will this increase electricity prices?
I think it's naive to assume that electricity prices will remain constant if we switch to electric vehicles. Yes, we'll pay less for gasoline, but I suspect that we'll end up paying the same total amount anyway because electricity prices will rise (especially since we have recently had our choices for increasing electricity production limited).