2) The Prius / Volt gets 48mpg highway; the Golf TDI gets 41mpg. Thus, diesel is actually is less efficient than a hybrid. A base Prius is $23,560; a base Golf TDI is $23,709. So really, there is no way a Golf would recoup the extra cost since it gets worse gas mileage and in most parts of the country the gas is more expensive.
Also, isn't the LEAF supposed to debut at $33,000 - $7,500 federal = $25,500 before any state rebates (several of which are $5,000) the Leaf makes perfect sense if you are in a household that is or will be a two-car household. (If you charge it at night, it's about $0.08/kWh for PG&E customers -- in other states without tiers it's probably about $0.12/kWh.)
Most households only need one vehicle with a range of more than 100 miles, so it makes sense for multi-car families to have one or more electric vehicles and one car that takes gasoline, which could be a (plug-in) hybrid.
To the person who pointed out electricity is not free: the energy content of gasoline is 36.6kWh/gal (of which only a third does useful thermodynamic work) and has an average price of $2.75 (more in California) which works out to $0.23/kWh, so unless your utility doesn't offer cheaper electricity for EV charging at night (required in California) or doesn't have tiers (most of the rest of the country), electric will be cheaper to refuel, in addition to being cheaper to maintain.
I don't know where you got your numbers but I think they are grossly misleading. First, you compare electricity production to transportation consumption and ignore the efficiency only on one side. So, we use 28 exajoules of energy for transportation, but it only does about 7 exajoules of work so we would only need 7 exajoules of electricity to replace all oil for transportation. However, a lot of transportation energy is used by planes, which aren't really a candidate for electrification. And then there are trains, buses, and taxis which we could in theory electrify but aren't really talking about. And then there is light rail, most of which is already electric and is therefore in both categories just for confusion. In the end, by electrifying cars, I'm estimating that we're only talking about another 2 exajoules of electricity or so, replacing 8 exajoules of oil.
I chose to convert everything into useful energy, not consumed energy. You could do the opposite if you like but it's complicated because different power plants have different efficiencies and if we're talking about pollution how do you adjust the efficiencies of solar power plants since on one hand they are technically inefficient but on the other hand they don't use any fossil fuels? Anyway, gas-fired power plants where most of the immediate increased consumptions would probably come from are about 50% efficient so you could just use that number to get an approximate result of replacing 8 exajoules of oil with 4 exajoules of natural gas.
At least here in California, you must change to be on a time-of-use rate (either for the whole house or just the charging station) if you plan on refueling an EV on premises. That said, the time-of-use rate is cheaper at night and on weekends ($0.057/kWh), the slightly cheaper during normal times ($0.102/kWh), and only more expensive ($0.282/kWh) from 2-9pm on weekdays during the summer. Note that in California we have a tiered system and I was assuming one was in the lowest tier ($0.112/kWh) but if you're in a higher tier then you are likely already paying $0.22-$0.34/kWh.
Before you complain about over-regulating everything, it actually costs you less money given that you have a choice of moving your whole house to time-of-use or just the EV charger. If you play it safe and only put the EV charger on the time-of-use rate, you would only have to charge your EV four times as much at night as you do during the summer daytime for it to cost you more money if you went with the EV charger only option. This should be easy if you use your car to commute to work each day or generally don't drain your battery every morning and need to drain it again every evening.
What do you mean extremely poorly at under 90% of capacity? They run just fine at under 90% of capacity, it just doesn't save you any money whatsoever because you can't turn down the rate of putting new fuel in like you can with fossil fuel plants and even if you could the fuel is a negligible cost of the power plant, the majority being design, construction, and safety. You have to refuel every 18 months (or something like that) because the fuel doesn't burn evenly when you run under capacity so you can't really just replace the more burned fuel and if you wait to refuel the plant you'd end up refueling in the middle of summer which is obviously counterproductive.
In academia, it seems like 80% of faculty/researchers already have Apple laptops, which essentially means that only the people with >5 year old Powerbooks or iBooks don't have interchangeable power bricks (which isn't that many). Thus, I expect most Apple customers wouldn't care (or even notice) if HP, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo, and Sony moved to using a standard connector.
But maybe in a corporation this would be different.
Why shouldn't taxes punish people for negative externalities? For example, gas taxes are a more free-market way of limiting smog from cars than mandating that every new car have a certain fuel economy or telling the manufacturers every car needs to be a hybrid. The argument isn't "we don't like X so let's tax them" but rather "action X has a hidden cost to the nation of $Y, let's tax it $Y". Of course, you're lucky if you can get 60 senators to agree that pollution is bad so we don't really hear much of the nitpicking over whether it's $Y or $Y-1, just that some people think there is a cost (in other words pollution is bad) and some don't. Taxes are for forcing the free market to realize negative externalities and funding needed government services. What's wrong with the argument "it would be better for the country if we taxed X"?
Furthermore, pretty much all of the taxes you pay do go to stuff the government pays for that you have previously benefited from (public education), are benefiting from (the military, police, fire protection, roads), or will benefit from (Social Security, Medicare, federally funded research). Now some of it is pretty indirect, like the Secret Service protecting the President, but in the end most of it still benefits the country. If the government cannot raise taxes to pay for these costs, how should it or should it stop doing them?
As a California resident and taxpayer, I just want to point out that far above the amount we are investing in education we are being gouged by an inefficient prison system that is incapable of change due to the power of the warden union/lobby that wastes the states resources.
Fifty years ago, California decided that in order to attract smart talent & entrepreneurs to the state they would offer free higher education. And look at Silicon Valley now.
The newspaper, not surprisingly, has the ability to reach a lot wider audience with what it says that this guy does. The libel laws are there for cases like this when someone lies / misrepresents the truth. Even arguing that he can inform the public of his side easily on the internet, what about everyone who read it in print, or who won't read what he writes because it won't be picked up by newspapers they read?
There needs to be an incentive to not lie about things in print. Saying that lies can be corrected doesn't necesarily fix the harm that was done.
Replace the optical drive. I've been keeping a log of how many times I've ever used my DVD drive while away from home. So far I'm at 1; I ripped a CD I got for Christmas before I brought it back home with me. It could have waited.
Yes, I know it doesn't work for everyone, but I think it works for most people, assuming you get a USB powered optical drive or enclosure.
Actually, his point was that no one was truly running the state of California because you need 2/3rds of the legislature and when, exactly, has either party had 2/3rds of the legislature and the governorship? Never.
Also note that grandparent suggested raising taxes on the wealthy; you seem to have missed that.
I'm also going to suggest taxing CO2 emissions in some form as a way of raising revenue.
Wait a second, your argument is that 3 consoles (including accessories) are as expensive as 2 gaming computers and therefore consoles are more expensive than gaming computers?
First of all, 3 Toyotas Highlanders are more expensive than 2 BMWs Z4s. Second, you can have more than one person play a console simultaneously, but you have to take turns on the gaming rig (or buy 2) -- like fitting more people in the Highlander. Finally, old consoles are fun (and cheap); old gaming computers suck at gaming.
Until recently kilo = 10^3 except for one easy-to-remember exception: a kilobyte was 2^10 bytes and similar for mega. Then the marketing departments at hard drive companies decided that they could provide 5% less space by calling a MB 10^6 bytes instead of 2^20 bytes. Before then, everyone knew that a kb was 1024 bytes. Now people don't know for sure. (For example, my computer reports that I have (and is sold as having) 2GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive, but I'm pretty sure my RAM is actually in base 2. Is the 10MB attachment limit in base 2 or base 10? In other words, now that we've all gotten used to a kb being 1024 bytes, why are we changing it?
Would an exception saying 1kb = 2^10 bytes etc. be too complicated? Other SI rules and their exceptions:
Prefixes for exponential factors greater than 0 are capitalized, except for deca, hecto, and kilo.
Don't capitalize symbols for units unless the unit is named after a person, except for the liter (L).*
Put spaces between the number and the symbol, except for %, degrees, arcminutes and arcseconds.*
Not to mention various ways of spelling liter/litre, country-specific abbreviations (amps), and country specific plurals (Henries), and it's ok to still use Celcius even though the SI unit is Kelvin.
*Liters, degrees, arcminutes, and arcseconds aren't really SI, and are on a separate list of non-SI units that are ok to use with SI.
I edited my display preferences so this slashdot article would appear as white text on a black background, thereby saving the photons inside my monitor for a later time.
Get a netbook with an ULV Core 2 Solo. It'll run circles around even your dual-core Atom and not use too much more power. The downside is that I think it only comes in 11.6" 'netbooks' but maybe soon it'll come in 10" netbooks.
Sure you can pick one bad thing and say to live away from it, but can you avoid everything?
How many places are above sea level (and will be in thirty years), away from major fault lines, outside tornado alley, isn't a desert but doesn't get fathoms of snow, outside of West-Nile Virus / malaria areas, away from volcanoes, near to a decent job, have a decent school system, and have a reasonable cost of living? I'm sure there are more factors, but I haven't looked to buy a house yet.
It depends on the orientation of the axis of the flywheel. If you try to place the flywheel so that the axis is horizontal, you'll end up with needing to apply a lot of torque in order to turn the vehicle left-right, making it harder to turn. If you place the flywheel so that the axis is vertical, the amount of torque necessary to flip the vehicle would go up, probably making this a safety feature for SUVs, and would have very little effect on the torque needed to turn the vehicle left-right.
The rule with (single-axis) gyroscopes is that the only axis it isn't harder to rotate the whole gyroscope around is the one around which it's already spinning; any non-parallel axis is harder.
I walked into a Starbucks, bought a Hot Chocolate and then wanted WiFi only to find out that you need to buy a Starbucks (cash) Card. Total BS; I don't want to give them $10 for WiFi after giving them my service. Why they can't just offer an hour of WiFi to someone who buys something is beyond me. If I liked coffee I'd boycott them; as it is, I'm never going into a Starbucks to try to get WiFi again. So Starbucks may not be charging for their WiFi, but it sure isn't free to anyone who isn't a regular customer.
Wait, the same NY Times which is having its readership obliterated by free news on the Internet (DNA registration required) and ad revenue plummeting is observing that people like TV shows more when technology allows them to not have to watch the ads which fund the shows?
So basically, you are saying that because it's a little bit of work for us right now, we're not going to bother and our grandkids are going to be stuck with these annoying units unless they decide to get off their lazy asses so their grandkids don't have to deal with manned missions crashing into Mars.
It's not that hard to get used to new units. The trick to remembering new units is to not convert them into the old ones but to imagine the represented quantity. Every time you think about a centimeter, practice spacing your thumb and index finger a centimeter apart and pretty soon you'll have a good idea of what a centimeter is without thinking about inches. Already Americans have a pretty good idea of how much liquid is in 2 liters because instead of converting to quarts, they think about soda in 2L bottles. As soon as the road signs on the freeways all say 105km/h people will have a good idea of what 105km/h is. Similarly when residential roads are all labeled 40mk/h. When you hear a temperature in Celcius, don't convert to Fahrenheit; 20C is comfortable, 37C is body temperature, and of course 0C is freezing and 100C is boiling.
If your application requires charging up and down electromagnets regularly, that boils helium regardless of how good your insulation is. You'd much rather be boiling nitrogen.
While they're currently expensive there are a lot of applications that just use a small amount of material (and low current and low field, which can be a downside at high Tc). For example, SQUIDs that can be cooled with LN2 instead of helium cost way less to operate and are just as good.
But adding a middle name and other information only helps if the article includes a different middle name (unlikely) and age (likely out of date).
I'd like to also mention that many job applications ask if you've ever been convicted of a felony so any competent HR person should see apparently conflicting information and research a bit further.
On a more realistic note, try contacting the newspaper and explain that you'd like them to add his middle name to the article so that when you add your middle name to your resume/CV it will be obvious if it isn't you. If they refuse, I would probably threaten to sue them for libel or contact the legal department or the "agent for service" and generally try to make it clear to them that it would be far easier to update the article with additional details differentiating you from the pedophile than to debate how the thousand-year history of defamation law applies to two people with the same name in court. Obviously consider consulting a lawyer if you're thinking about actually suing them. I'm pretty sure that if you sued the newspaper for libel it would make a pretty interesting court case because on one hand the article is defaming you and yet everything printed is (presumably) true about someone else with the same name.
PS. A good strategy to bump it down a couple of notches might have been to get a slashdot article about this above it in the search results by mentioning your real name.
Slashdot Mirror
2) The Prius / Volt gets 48mpg highway; the Golf TDI gets 41mpg. Thus, diesel is actually is less efficient than a hybrid. A base Prius is $23,560; a base Golf TDI is $23,709. So really, there is no way a Golf would recoup the extra cost since it gets worse gas mileage and in most parts of the country the gas is more expensive.
Also, isn't the LEAF supposed to debut at $33,000 - $7,500 federal = $25,500 before any state rebates (several of which are $5,000) the Leaf makes perfect sense if you are in a household that is or will be a two-car household. (If you charge it at night, it's about $0.08/kWh for PG&E customers -- in other states without tiers it's probably about $0.12/kWh.)
Most households only need one vehicle with a range of more than 100 miles, so it makes sense for multi-car families to have one or more electric vehicles and one car that takes gasoline, which could be a (plug-in) hybrid.
To the person who pointed out electricity is not free: the energy content of gasoline is 36.6kWh/gal (of which only a third does useful thermodynamic work) and has an average price of $2.75 (more in California) which works out to $0.23/kWh, so unless your utility doesn't offer cheaper electricity for EV charging at night (required in California) or doesn't have tiers (most of the rest of the country), electric will be cheaper to refuel, in addition to being cheaper to maintain.
I don't know where you got your numbers but I think they are grossly misleading. First, you compare electricity production to transportation consumption and ignore the efficiency only on one side. So, we use 28 exajoules of energy for transportation, but it only does about 7 exajoules of work so we would only need 7 exajoules of electricity to replace all oil for transportation. However, a lot of transportation energy is used by planes, which aren't really a candidate for electrification. And then there are trains, buses, and taxis which we could in theory electrify but aren't really talking about. And then there is light rail, most of which is already electric and is therefore in both categories just for confusion. In the end, by electrifying cars, I'm estimating that we're only talking about another 2 exajoules of electricity or so, replacing 8 exajoules of oil.
I chose to convert everything into useful energy, not consumed energy. You could do the opposite if you like but it's complicated because different power plants have different efficiencies and if we're talking about pollution how do you adjust the efficiencies of solar power plants since on one hand they are technically inefficient but on the other hand they don't use any fossil fuels? Anyway, gas-fired power plants where most of the immediate increased consumptions would probably come from are about 50% efficient so you could just use that number to get an approximate result of replacing 8 exajoules of oil with 4 exajoules of natural gas.
At least here in California, you must change to be on a time-of-use rate (either for the whole house or just the charging station) if you plan on refueling an EV on premises. That said, the time-of-use rate is cheaper at night and on weekends ($0.057/kWh), the slightly cheaper during normal times ($0.102/kWh), and only more expensive ($0.282/kWh) from 2-9pm on weekdays during the summer. Note that in California we have a tiered system and I was assuming one was in the lowest tier ($0.112/kWh) but if you're in a higher tier then you are likely already paying $0.22-$0.34/kWh.
Before you complain about over-regulating everything, it actually costs you less money given that you have a choice of moving your whole house to time-of-use or just the EV charger. If you play it safe and only put the EV charger on the time-of-use rate, you would only have to charge your EV four times as much at night as you do during the summer daytime for it to cost you more money if you went with the EV charger only option. This should be easy if you use your car to commute to work each day or generally don't drain your battery every morning and need to drain it again every evening.
What do you mean extremely poorly at under 90% of capacity? They run just fine at under 90% of capacity, it just doesn't save you any money whatsoever because you can't turn down the rate of putting new fuel in like you can with fossil fuel plants and even if you could the fuel is a negligible cost of the power plant, the majority being design, construction, and safety. You have to refuel every 18 months (or something like that) because the fuel doesn't burn evenly when you run under capacity so you can't really just replace the more burned fuel and if you wait to refuel the plant you'd end up refueling in the middle of summer which is obviously counterproductive.
11 million years, so we have about 16 million years to figure out what happens and then do something about it.
In academia, it seems like 80% of faculty/researchers already have Apple laptops, which essentially means that only the people with >5 year old Powerbooks or iBooks don't have interchangeable power bricks (which isn't that many). Thus, I expect most Apple customers wouldn't care (or even notice) if HP, Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo, and Sony moved to using a standard connector.
But maybe in a corporation this would be different.
Why shouldn't taxes punish people for negative externalities? For example, gas taxes are a more free-market way of limiting smog from cars than mandating that every new car have a certain fuel economy or telling the manufacturers every car needs to be a hybrid. The argument isn't "we don't like X so let's tax them" but rather "action X has a hidden cost to the nation of $Y, let's tax it $Y". Of course, you're lucky if you can get 60 senators to agree that pollution is bad so we don't really hear much of the nitpicking over whether it's $Y or $Y-1, just that some people think there is a cost (in other words pollution is bad) and some don't. Taxes are for forcing the free market to realize negative externalities and funding needed government services. What's wrong with the argument "it would be better for the country if we taxed X"? Furthermore, pretty much all of the taxes you pay do go to stuff the government pays for that you have previously benefited from (public education), are benefiting from (the military, police, fire protection, roads), or will benefit from (Social Security, Medicare, federally funded research). Now some of it is pretty indirect, like the Secret Service protecting the President, but in the end most of it still benefits the country. If the government cannot raise taxes to pay for these costs, how should it or should it stop doing them?
As a California resident and taxpayer, I just want to point out that far above the amount we are investing in education we are being gouged by an inefficient prison system that is incapable of change due to the power of the warden union/lobby that wastes the states resources.
Fifty years ago, California decided that in order to attract smart talent & entrepreneurs to the state they would offer free higher education. And look at Silicon Valley now.
The newspaper, not surprisingly, has the ability to reach a lot wider audience with what it says that this guy does. The libel laws are there for cases like this when someone lies / misrepresents the truth. Even arguing that he can inform the public of his side easily on the internet, what about everyone who read it in print, or who won't read what he writes because it won't be picked up by newspapers they read?
There needs to be an incentive to not lie about things in print. Saying that lies can be corrected doesn't necesarily fix the harm that was done.
Replace the optical drive. I've been keeping a log of how many times I've ever used my DVD drive while away from home. So far I'm at 1; I ripped a CD I got for Christmas before I brought it back home with me. It could have waited.
Yes, I know it doesn't work for everyone, but I think it works for most people, assuming you get a USB powered optical drive or enclosure.
Actually, his point was that no one was truly running the state of California because you need 2/3rds of the legislature and when, exactly, has either party had 2/3rds of the legislature and the governorship? Never.
Also note that grandparent suggested raising taxes on the wealthy; you seem to have missed that.
I'm also going to suggest taxing CO2 emissions in some form as a way of raising revenue.
Wait a second, your argument is that 3 consoles (including accessories) are as expensive as 2 gaming computers and therefore consoles are more expensive than gaming computers?
First of all, 3 Toyotas Highlanders are more expensive than 2 BMWs Z4s. Second, you can have more than one person play a console simultaneously, but you have to take turns on the gaming rig (or buy 2) -- like fitting more people in the Highlander. Finally, old consoles are fun (and cheap); old gaming computers suck at gaming.
Plus Mozilla doesn't also own Linux and isn't trying to get you to shell out another $100 for the latest and greatest Linux.
Until recently kilo = 10^3 except for one easy-to-remember exception: a kilobyte was 2^10 bytes and similar for mega. Then the marketing departments at hard drive companies decided that they could provide 5% less space by calling a MB 10^6 bytes instead of 2^20 bytes. Before then, everyone knew that a kb was 1024 bytes. Now people don't know for sure. (For example, my computer reports that I have (and is sold as having) 2GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive, but I'm pretty sure my RAM is actually in base 2. Is the 10MB attachment limit in base 2 or base 10? In other words, now that we've all gotten used to a kb being 1024 bytes, why are we changing it?
Would an exception saying 1kb = 2^10 bytes etc. be too complicated? Other SI rules and their exceptions: Prefixes for exponential factors greater than 0 are capitalized, except for deca, hecto, and kilo. Don't capitalize symbols for units unless the unit is named after a person, except for the liter (L).* Put spaces between the number and the symbol, except for %, degrees, arcminutes and arcseconds.*
Not to mention various ways of spelling liter/litre, country-specific abbreviations (amps), and country specific plurals (Henries), and it's ok to still use Celcius even though the SI unit is Kelvin.
*Liters, degrees, arcminutes, and arcseconds aren't really SI, and are on a separate list of non-SI units that are ok to use with SI.
I edited my display preferences so this slashdot article would appear as white text on a black background, thereby saving the photons inside my monitor for a later time.
64.0wpm should be enough for anyone.
Get a netbook with an ULV Core 2 Solo. It'll run circles around even your dual-core Atom and not use too much more power. The downside is that I think it only comes in 11.6" 'netbooks' but maybe soon it'll come in 10" netbooks.
Sure you can pick one bad thing and say to live away from it, but can you avoid everything? How many places are above sea level (and will be in thirty years), away from major fault lines, outside tornado alley, isn't a desert but doesn't get fathoms of snow, outside of West-Nile Virus / malaria areas, away from volcanoes, near to a decent job, have a decent school system, and have a reasonable cost of living? I'm sure there are more factors, but I haven't looked to buy a house yet.
Just submit it as homework.doc.txt and I'd bet he won't notice it's not a word document.
It depends on the orientation of the axis of the flywheel. If you try to place the flywheel so that the axis is horizontal, you'll end up with needing to apply a lot of torque in order to turn the vehicle left-right, making it harder to turn. If you place the flywheel so that the axis is vertical, the amount of torque necessary to flip the vehicle would go up, probably making this a safety feature for SUVs, and would have very little effect on the torque needed to turn the vehicle left-right.
The rule with (single-axis) gyroscopes is that the only axis it isn't harder to rotate the whole gyroscope around is the one around which it's already spinning; any non-parallel axis is harder.
I walked into a Starbucks, bought a Hot Chocolate and then wanted WiFi only to find out that you need to buy a Starbucks (cash) Card. Total BS; I don't want to give them $10 for WiFi after giving them my service. Why they can't just offer an hour of WiFi to someone who buys something is beyond me. If I liked coffee I'd boycott them; as it is, I'm never going into a Starbucks to try to get WiFi again. So Starbucks may not be charging for their WiFi, but it sure isn't free to anyone who isn't a regular customer.
Wait, the same NY Times which is having its readership obliterated by free news on the Internet (DNA registration required) and ad revenue plummeting is observing that people like TV shows more when technology allows them to not have to watch the ads which fund the shows?
So basically, you are saying that because it's a little bit of work for us right now, we're not going to bother and our grandkids are going to be stuck with these annoying units unless they decide to get off their lazy asses so their grandkids don't have to deal with manned missions crashing into Mars.
It's not that hard to get used to new units. The trick to remembering new units is to not convert them into the old ones but to imagine the represented quantity. Every time you think about a centimeter, practice spacing your thumb and index finger a centimeter apart and pretty soon you'll have a good idea of what a centimeter is without thinking about inches. Already Americans have a pretty good idea of how much liquid is in 2 liters because instead of converting to quarts, they think about soda in 2L bottles. As soon as the road signs on the freeways all say 105km/h people will have a good idea of what 105km/h is. Similarly when residential roads are all labeled 40mk/h. When you hear a temperature in Celcius, don't convert to Fahrenheit; 20C is comfortable, 37C is body temperature, and of course 0C is freezing and 100C is boiling.
If your application requires charging up and down electromagnets regularly, that boils helium regardless of how good your insulation is. You'd much rather be boiling nitrogen.
While they're currently expensive there are a lot of applications that just use a small amount of material (and low current and low field, which can be a downside at high Tc). For example, SQUIDs that can be cooled with LN2 instead of helium cost way less to operate and are just as good.
But adding a middle name and other information only helps if the article includes a different middle name (unlikely) and age (likely out of date).
I'd like to also mention that many job applications ask if you've ever been convicted of a felony so any competent HR person should see apparently conflicting information and research a bit further.
On a more realistic note, try contacting the newspaper and explain that you'd like them to add his middle name to the article so that when you add your middle name to your resume/CV it will be obvious if it isn't you. If they refuse, I would probably threaten to sue them for libel or contact the legal department or the "agent for service" and generally try to make it clear to them that it would be far easier to update the article with additional details differentiating you from the pedophile than to debate how the thousand-year history of defamation law applies to two people with the same name in court. Obviously consider consulting a lawyer if you're thinking about actually suing them. I'm pretty sure that if you sued the newspaper for libel it would make a pretty interesting court case because on one hand the article is defaming you and yet everything printed is (presumably) true about someone else with the same name.
PS. A good strategy to bump it down a couple of notches might have been to get a slashdot article about this above it in the search results by mentioning your real name.