has officially journeyed into the drones product category. A new line of business is not a bloody trip to the mines of Moria. Anonymous, the word you seek is "entered," Always use the simplest wordng to avoid looking stupid.
These clowns manage to opine about the state of the world without mentioning "environment", " climate ", or " species ". It's nice that war and violence are down, but ignoring the fact that overpopulation, habitat destruction, and climate change have brought our home planet to the sixth great extinction event is unforgivable. The world IS falling apart, you deliberately clueless assholes.
Why not develop a great technology and license it to the real auto manufacturers like Honda and Toyota and GM and Ford? All of them want to get into the EV business but their tech isn't as good,.
What great technology is there to license? All those automakers already work with suppliers selling batteries, motors, inverters, etc. and have all sold compliance EVs in small numbers with those parts. A new licensor or part supplier would have to be dramatically better to get in the door. "Better" here means way cheaper, and cheap requires volume and the manufacturers apart from GM are refusing to commit to high-volume EV sales. So you'd have to convince a number of manufacturers that your widget is the future and hope their combined orders of 10,000 gets you to volume discount production. GM did invest in Sakti and a failed battery startup, it seems nobody has been that much better at the other parts then existing suppliers. And Magna International developed the whole drivetrain for the Food Focus EV, and the result is Ford is even less interested in selling a Not-Invented-Here design.
I would love the existing big manufacturers to realize they're missing out on a revolution in transportation and be desperately investing in any idea that keeps them relevant in the electric auto business. They aren't.
[Nissan] helped develop the CHAdeMO standard for charging EVs, and the rival CCS standard is just an inferior rip-off and the Tesla one clearly borrows a lot of ideas from both.
CHAdeMO: 62.5 kW, CCS 90 kW, Supercharger 120 kW, (Porsche's Turbocharger 800 V proposal is ?? 240 kW if it's SAE DC Level 3). The politics of standard-setting are terrible, but each is an advance. CHAdeMO is a separate connector to the SAE J1772 they all support.
Most importantly, Nissan makes an affordable EV that demonstrates that for most people the limited range is not a problem.... Nissan built a charging network and proved that range anxiety is something you quickly overcome and isn't a big deal anyway.
The Leaf is a fine car and is deservedly the best-selling EV of all time. But waiting 30 minutes to recharge the car after every 75 minutes of highway driving is no fun. You don't get stranded, but you don't take long trips.
Who would want to buy a car for 100% more than the competition's car?
Cars are not like electronics. New cars range in price from the $12,815 Nissan Versa to million dollar exotics. It's not clear to many of us what you get in an expensive German car that is 100% more expensive than a comparable American/Japanese/Korean car, especially after you add expensive options that are included in the cheaper car's premium model.
One of the great achievements of Tesla is to build an expensive electric car that is not just the best production EV, but also compares well with premium sports sedans, luxury hybrids, and supercars. I welcome other purpose-built EVs, but unless Faraday/Apple is building a pickup truck, there isn't much uncontested space to compete in.
I do kind of hate how KDE has to break everything and start over for each new QT version.
tl;dr: Then don't upgrade. Or trust your distro to do the right thing. There's no one KDEN any more.
KDE tends to group a rethink of their project to a new Qt version, why not? Software evolves. KDE4 introduced plasma, phonon, solid. There is no single "KDE 5". The KDE Frameworks 5 reorganizes the KDE libraries, and the new Plasma 5 desktop changes the theme and graphics stack. http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/... tries to explain what's going on.
I started with Kubuntu 9.04 which ran KDE 4.2, and by 4.4 it was trouble-free. The recent Kubuntu 14.10 -> 15.04 upgrade switched me from KDE4 to Plasma 5.2, I think Kubuntu is the first major distro to jump to Plasma 5. It was a seamless upgrade, everything just worked despite the seismic changes underneath (systemd, Plasma 5, etc.). Plasma 5.2 in Kubuntu is using various libkf5 packages and libqt5core5a according to http://packages.ubuntu.com/viv... , but I believe not all the KDE apps have switched over from KDE4. It's interesting that in the blog post above Jos Poortvliet writes "I'd recommend moving over your work desktop or laptop for [Plasma] 5.4." In my experience Plasma 5.2 and the KDE apps are in good shape, better than the audio and display problems I had with KDE 4.2. I reported a couple of medium-priority KDE bugs that were fixed already so I added the Kubuntu backports PPA to get Plasma 5.3, and it's better still.
Why not use the web service you want to, and simply use Mozilla Sync to provide the bookmark to it.
Because web services spy on you and share or sell what you give them and everything else they discern about you. Firefox with cookie and tracker blockers reduces some of your exposure, but why have any? My calendar, to-do list, and movements are nobody's business but my own.
That's my 2 cents, it merely takes $20M to implement.
Plus a lot more to operate the data centers needed to store and sync all that data around....
True. The sync payload isn't that big for the apps I mentioned. Music is a lot to transfer but with de-duping of everyone's identical Taylor Swift tracks it isn't so much to store, though i can't see how you maintain encryption with de-duping. I deliberately left a photo-video app off the list because it's a huge amount of unique data that you do want backed up and your favorites sync'd. So maybe you pay for cloud media storage and only Firefox-sync metadata. Or web apps sync big data with OwnCloud or FreedomBox running on your router, another open alternative that's struggling for investment and mindshare.
I really want an alternative to Android, but it's an even bigger challenge than I thought.
Much of the value of Google's contacts, calendar, music player, etc. on Android is I can access the data from any browser. It's so useful I grit my teeth and share my personal info with evil Google. Firefox OS has its own HTML5 versions of those apps running locally, yet they don't run in desktop or Android Firefox. If the apps did run in every Firefox (and eventually any standards-compliant browser) and Firefox Sync securely kept the apps' data in sync (FF Sync is encrypted, so no one can spy on my personal data) then i would find it pretty compelling.
That's my 2 cents, it merely takes $20M to implement. I like Firefox, and I enjoy the sync. Having open productivity apps running in a browser fits with Mozilla's mission. I want more stuff running in a browser without spying, because it levels the playing field for Linux and could lead to a lightweight boot-to-browser environment for my phone, laptop, desktop, and tablet. Part of Google has that vision with ChromeOS, but they can't let go of the lock-in and dominance Android gave them. It's depressing seeing everyone piss all over Mozilla instead of supporting an alternative to picking a closed proprietary environment provided by a spying corporation.
A 150-year old observation about markets and business production does not apply to individuals spending money to reduce consumption. Sure, a few people who overspend to get a more fuel-efficient car will maintain their gasoline budget and take extra trips in it, but far more will take the money saved on fuel and spend it on other things. Sure, those things have their own energy costs, but a fancy Apple gizmo has far less embodied energy than the gasoline the owner saved. Besides, those wacky environmentalists spending $$$ to consume less energy are likely to spend some of the money saved on additional energy-saving measures.
Read the Wikipedia article more carefully, there are so many caveats and non-linearities that it really is a weak argument even before you consider individual consumers' motivations.
See my post elsewhere. Nissan probably invested 20x more in Leaf production than Fiat did in the 500e, so Nissan enjoys economy of scale. They claimed the Leaf is profitable in November 2013.
A Maserati Ghibli costs $66,900. The Fiat 500e is $24,800 if you quality for the full federal income tax credit of $7500, and even less with other incentives. Instructing strangers how to spend their money is not a good strategy, comrade.
Toyota had a similar mindset as GM, but couldn't compete on ZEVs
No one tried to compete on EVs. GM spent money on the amazing EV1 but was never serious about promoting it and simultaneously lobbied to kill the ZEV mandate. Meanwhile the original Toyota RAV4 EV was a fine car and some happy pioneer owners are still running theirs because Toyota sold 300 of them instead of leasing, almost by accident.
Given the state of the art in electric vehicles I really don't see an electric vehicle being significantly profitable at less than $50,000 right now. There simply aren't enough of them out there to drive the unit costs down. I expect that number to fall over time but it will require investment by companies
Facts congruent with your last sentence disprove your first sentence. The Nissan Leaf sells around $29,000 (thus $22K if you get the EV tax credit) and in November 2013 Nissan claimed it is profitable. The difference between the Leaf and compliance cars like the Fiat 500e (and the Ford Focus EV, GM Spark EV, Honda Fit EV, Smart ED, Toyota RAV4 EV, etc., etc., etc.) is that Nissan has invested hundreds of millions in the Leaf, building its own battery plants near the production sites in USA, Europe, and Japan. Result: there were "34,000 Leafs on US roads today and 75,000 worldwide", and thousands more since then.
Maybe Fiat and all the other compliance car makers thought their component suppliers would magically sell them cheap battery packs, motors, inverters, on-board chargers, etc. That may come with standardization and aggregate volume, but Tesla and Nissan (and maybe BMW with its big investment in the i3 brand) have shown that to drive costs down, you make it yourself in volume and/or order tens of thousands of parts. Car companies grudgingly building 2,000 compliance cars over 3 years can STFU about costs.
and maybe some government subsidies here and there.
Power grids must always have excess capacity available or risk going down and most industrial sized power plants take hours to throttle up while usually providing very little storage capacity.... we may be able to someday store electrical power and smooth out the uncertainly. There's a fix for that: all the electrical energy stored in electric vehicle batteries. Hence the dozens of studies and pilot programs of Vehicle 2 Grid systems where the utility can work with its customers to meet peak demand. And just like rooftop solar, the customer is spending the $1000s per kWh capital costs, not the utility!
But just like rooftop solar, when it comes to a utility actually paying its customers instead of billing them... Does. Not. Compute. <Utility looks around wildly for government people to influence so it can raise rates>
Electric Utilities are heavily regulated. I am not sure about Oklahoma, but in many states the rate that utilities can charge is tied back to the cost of electric production Sure, and the battles over the rates that utilities pay for customer-generated electricity are raging right now.
Since electric production tends to be capital intensive But in this case the utility customers are putting up the money!! I blew $19,000 on solar panels, my utility got a new source of electrons for no money down! I'm taking on the risk for them!
Feeding electricity back into the grid is not a free lunch for the utilities – there are costs involved. Well the utilities say that, but it's mostly fear-mongering. The wires they built to send electricity to my house will happily carry electricity in the other direction. And again, compared to building a new fossil fuel plant buying my excess instead of fueling a plant is easy money for the utilities.
(and I am sure that electric utilities will whine loudly in an exaggerated fashion as they fight a rearguard action.) That's what this is all about. Most states have net metering: if the utility sells to me at 15/kWh , I can sell my excess to them at the same rate. It's currently a win for the utilities because they're getting electrons in the hot summer with minimal capital cost, but they're throwing up roadblocks and raising rates now in fear of a future where a significant percentage of their customers are selling to them. In a fair system they would pay me what they would pay to run a plant at that moment, less a transmission fee and plus a bonus that my electrons are low CO2. this month's Sierra Magazine lists state-by-state efforts to fight net metering, refuse to hook up new solar installations, etc. South Carolina sounds worse than Oklahoma, there "initial determination that rooftop-solar leases should be banned as unfair competition to the utility industry."
In a sane approach to limiting global warming, there would be taxes on fossil-generated electricity or (less ideally) carbon emissions trading, and the utilities would be trying to figure out how to decrease those costs. Well hey look, our customers are putting up their own capital to solve the problem for us!
It's a similar situation with V2G (Vehicle 2 Grid) to cope with demand spikes and brown-outs. Electrical vehicle owners could be a huge instantaneous reserve of electrons to avoid, without the capital and operational costs of having dirty peaker plants on standby. There have been dozens of studies of this, but again the electric utilities are allergic to the idea of paying their customers. Most owners would be willing to let the utility drain 20% of their battery, but not if they get nothing in return.
I naively hoped that the electric utilities would be happy about distributed renewable power generation and would evolve to work with customers who are also suppliers to their mutual benefit. But it turns out they're wedded to the idea of burning fossil fuels to make electricity to sell to us, and many are in bed with the fucking Koch brothers. But soon they'll need electrons more than people with renewables need them: "SolarCity is partnering with electric car company Tesla... to store solar energy in battery packs for use at night, with a connection to the grid solely for backup."
* Marissa Mayer (2012–)
* Ross Levinsohn _Interim_ (2012)
* Scott Thompson (2012)
* Tim Morse _Interim_ (2011–2012)
* Carol Bartz (2009–2011)
* Jerry Yang (2007–2009)
after a string of recent short-tenured CEOs at Mozilla's helm. Kovacs became CEO in 2010, and announced his departure in 2013, I think 7-year veteran Jay Sullivan has been acting CEO since then. Before that John Lilly was CEO for 2 years, taking over from Mitchell Baker who remains as Chairman. Two short-term CEOs in a row makes a pair, not a string.
All the comments about H2 efficiency and explosive risk completely miss the point. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have been feasible for years, there have been a few Honda Clarity and Mercedes B-Class FCVs driving round Southern California (which has the ONLY public refueling stations in the entire USA) for several years.
The problem is demand. If you care about the environment you plug in for your regular commute. You can can already buy a plug-in hybrid for half the price and lower running costs than these 2015 cars. As Volt owners gleefully report, most drivers travel for hundreds of miles recharging at home, but for long trips the car has the quick refueling of gasoline that's available everywhere.
There's a market of people who don't want any tailpipe emissions and can't plug in and regularly drive long distances and live near the handful of H2 stations and are willing to spend a lot of money on a new technology, but it's vanishingly small!
Eventually fossil fuels could be so expensive or restricted that H2 will be the range-extender we use for our plug-in vehicles, if ethanol from biomass doesn't work out. But that's a long way away. Meanwhile Toyota and Hyundai are very cagey about whether you can plug in their HFCVs; it seems the answer is No. Their cars have a battery and motor so plugging in is the cheapest way to drive the first few miles, and I think soon consumers will reject a motor-driven car that you can't plug in. The comparative reviews of the first HFCVs against 2015's plug-in hybrid cars will be brutal, and there will be dozens of "gotcha" pieces, wherein the brave reporter drives out of Southern California and gets stranded.
The hydrogen combustion car is dead, dead. It combines the chicken-and-egg problems of hydrogen fuel distribution with all the inefficiency of blowing stuff up to make heat and a little forward motion. At least fuel cells are efficient.
The BMW 7 series and Mazda rotary hydrogen ICE demo cars came out years ago. Nothing serious since. Periodically some lame manufacturer without access to fuel cells or batteries converts an engine to burn hydrogen, but it's a stunt that goes nowhere.
The summary seems to imply that Gibson made the Matrix. No it doesn't, there's an "or" in there.
However, William Gibson never envisioned mind control in Virtual Reality either. You jacked in to cyberspace, a consensual hallucination of a graphic representation of data (which never took off, there's no "representation" of the net at all when you jump from Slashdot to YouTube), but Gibson explicitly had his hackers typing commands while jacked in: "distant fingers caressing the deck", "whip moves on those keyboards faster than you could follow", etc.
Gibson's Neuromancer follow-up Count Zero is stuffed with profoundly prescient ideas like fully-immersive telepresence and one of the first descriptions of hanging out with people's avatars in cyberspace, but the closest he comes to a "brain-computer interface" is slotting in a piece of microsoft behind your ear which gives you the knowledge to fly a real plane in physical reality. Similarly, in Spads & Fokkers (his short story with Michael Swanwick) players use a brain interface to control a holographic plane in a videogame: "He fitted the Batang behind his ear after coating the inductor surface with paste, jacked its fiberoptic ribbon into the programmer,... when it was done, a sky-blue Spad darted restlessly through the air a few inches from his face. It almost glowed, it was so real. It had the strange inner life that fanatically detailed museum-grade models often have, but it took all of his concentration to keep it in existence. If his attention wavered at all, it lost focus, fuzzing into a pathetic blur."
In another comment undefinedreference says You could play a video game or work in a virtual environment while your body is essentially at the gym. Gibson foresaw that too, but “The street finds its own uses for things,” and so Rikki in Burning Chrome is "working three-hour shifts in an approximation of REM sleep, while her body and a bundle of conditioned reflexes took care of business. The customers never got to complain that she was faking it, because those were real orgasms. But she felt them, if she felt them at all, as faint silver flares somewhere out on the edge of sleep."
Gibson's ideas are masterful poetic riffs on the future, but they aren't its operating manual.
Oh STFU. If you come out with a neat piece of software that runs in a browser, you can post a link to it (like this one) and millions of people can run it in a single click because it's so damn easy. If your software is written in anything else but JavaScript, people have to screw around downloading runtimes and saving and executing binaries, and at best 5% as many people will bother trying it. Sure, an app store simplifies that, but now you have to build multiple app versions, iOS, Android, and whatever the hell Windows uses, and you've still left millions of potential users out.
It's the universal availability of JavaScript and zero-install that you get by running it in a web browser that drives the innovation and interest in it, and there's no sign of it stopping. Go build an OpenRISC emulator in C that's far better in every way than this, post a link to the installer, and watch your effort get ignored.
GCHQ designed by Gensler is 1.1M square feet for 4,600 staff. Apple is 2.8M square feet for 14,200.
Foster and Partners are a fantastic firm, their buildings are reliably masterpieces of design and engineering, and Sir Norman is arguably the greatest living architect, but they don't come cheap. The insanely great HSBC building was the most expensive building in the world in 1985.
Well, what should happen when you lift off the accelerator? In a conventional car, the engine brakes the car, and engine braking increases in lower gears. So GM has reused the concept to adjust the amount of brake regen when you lift off. Other electrified cars coast, or apply a set amount of regen. I don't know what VW's new plug-in hybrids, with a conventional dual-clutch transmission, do.
Tesla hooks brake regen up to the accelerator pedal, so as you lift off more more brake regen increases, turning it into an accelerator/decelerator control. One-footed driving sounds like a blast.
Slashdot Mirror
has officially journeyed into the drones product category.
A new line of business is not a bloody trip to the mines of Moria. Anonymous, the word you seek is "entered," Always use the simplest wordng to avoid looking stupid.
These clowns manage to opine about the state of the world without mentioning "environment", " climate ", or " species ". It's nice that war and violence are down, but ignoring the fact that overpopulation, habitat destruction, and climate change have brought our home planet to the sixth great extinction event is unforgivable. The world IS falling apart, you deliberately clueless assholes.
Why not develop a great technology and license it to the real auto manufacturers like Honda and Toyota and GM and Ford? All of them want to get into the EV business but their tech isn't as good, .
What great technology is there to license? All those automakers already work with suppliers selling batteries, motors, inverters, etc. and have all sold compliance EVs in small numbers with those parts. A new licensor or part supplier would have to be dramatically better to get in the door. "Better" here means way cheaper, and cheap requires volume and the manufacturers apart from GM are refusing to commit to high-volume EV sales. So you'd have to convince a number of manufacturers that your widget is the future and hope their combined orders of 10,000 gets you to volume discount production. GM did invest in Sakti and a failed battery startup, it seems nobody has been that much better at the other parts then existing suppliers. And Magna International developed the whole drivetrain for the Food Focus EV, and the result is Ford is even less interested in selling a Not-Invented-Here design.
I would love the existing big manufacturers to realize they're missing out on a revolution in transportation and be desperately investing in any idea that keeps them relevant in the electric auto business. They aren't.
[Nissan] helped develop the CHAdeMO standard for charging EVs, and the rival CCS standard is just an inferior rip-off and the Tesla one clearly borrows a lot of ideas from both.
CHAdeMO: 62.5 kW, CCS 90 kW, Supercharger 120 kW, (Porsche's Turbocharger 800 V proposal is ?? 240 kW if it's SAE DC Level 3). The politics of standard-setting are terrible, but each is an advance. CHAdeMO is a separate connector to the SAE J1772 they all support.
Most importantly, Nissan makes an affordable EV that demonstrates that for most people the limited range is not a problem. ... Nissan built a charging network and proved that range anxiety is something you quickly overcome and isn't a big deal anyway.
The Leaf is a fine car and is deservedly the best-selling EV of all time. But waiting 30 minutes to recharge the car after every 75 minutes of highway driving is no fun. You don't get stranded, but you don't take long trips.
Who would want to buy a car for 100% more than the competition's car?
Cars are not like electronics. New cars range in price from the $12,815 Nissan Versa to million dollar exotics. It's not clear to many of us what you get in an expensive German car that is 100% more expensive than a comparable American/Japanese/Korean car, especially after you add expensive options that are included in the cheaper car's premium model.
One of the great achievements of Tesla is to build an expensive electric car that is not just the best production EV, but also compares well with premium sports sedans, luxury hybrids, and supercars. I welcome other purpose-built EVs, but unless Faraday/Apple is building a pickup truck, there isn't much uncontested space to compete in.
I do kind of hate how KDE has to break everything and start over for each new QT version.
tl;dr: Then don't upgrade. Or trust your distro to do the right thing. There's no one KDEN any more.
KDE tends to group a rethink of their project to a new Qt version, why not? Software evolves. KDE4 introduced plasma, phonon, solid. There is no single "KDE 5". The KDE Frameworks 5 reorganizes the KDE libraries, and the new Plasma 5 desktop changes the theme and graphics stack. http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/... tries to explain what's going on.
I started with Kubuntu 9.04 which ran KDE 4.2, and by 4.4 it was trouble-free. The recent Kubuntu 14.10 -> 15.04 upgrade switched me from KDE4 to Plasma 5.2, I think Kubuntu is the first major distro to jump to Plasma 5. It was a seamless upgrade, everything just worked despite the seismic changes underneath (systemd, Plasma 5, etc.). Plasma 5.2 in Kubuntu is using various libkf5 packages and libqt5core5a according to http://packages.ubuntu.com/viv... , but I believe not all the KDE apps have switched over from KDE4. It's interesting that in the blog post above Jos Poortvliet writes "I'd recommend moving over your work desktop or laptop for [Plasma] 5.4." In my experience Plasma 5.2 and the KDE apps are in good shape, better than the audio and display problems I had with KDE 4.2. I reported a couple of medium-priority KDE bugs that were fixed already so I added the Kubuntu backports PPA to get Plasma 5.3, and it's better still.
YMMV.
Why not use the web service you want to, and simply use Mozilla Sync to provide the bookmark to it.
Because web services spy on you and share or sell what you give them and everything else they discern about you. Firefox with cookie and tracker blockers reduces some of your exposure, but why have any? My calendar, to-do list, and movements are nobody's business but my own.
That's my 2 cents, it merely takes $20M to implement.
Plus a lot more to operate the data centers needed to store and sync all that data around. ...
True. The sync payload isn't that big for the apps I mentioned. Music is a lot to transfer but with de-duping of everyone's identical Taylor Swift tracks it isn't so much to store, though i can't see how you maintain encryption with de-duping. I deliberately left a photo-video app off the list because it's a huge amount of unique data that you do want backed up and your favorites sync'd. So maybe you pay for cloud media storage and only Firefox-sync metadata. Or web apps sync big data with OwnCloud or FreedomBox running on your router, another open alternative that's struggling for investment and mindshare.
I really want an alternative to Android, but it's an even bigger challenge than I thought.
Much of the value of Google's contacts, calendar, music player, etc. on Android is I can access the data from any browser. It's so useful I grit my teeth and share my personal info with evil Google. Firefox OS has its own HTML5 versions of those apps running locally, yet they don't run in desktop or Android Firefox. If the apps did run in every Firefox (and eventually any standards-compliant browser) and Firefox Sync securely kept the apps' data in sync (FF Sync is encrypted, so no one can spy on my personal data) then i would find it pretty compelling.
That's my 2 cents, it merely takes $20M to implement. I like Firefox, and I enjoy the sync. Having open productivity apps running in a browser fits with Mozilla's mission. I want more stuff running in a browser without spying, because it levels the playing field for Linux and could lead to a lightweight boot-to-browser environment for my phone, laptop, desktop, and tablet. Part of Google has that vision with ChromeOS, but they can't let go of the lock-in and dominance Android gave them. It's depressing seeing everyone piss all over Mozilla instead of supporting an alternative to picking a closed proprietary environment provided by a spying corporation.
A 150-year old observation about markets and business production does not apply to individuals spending money to reduce consumption. Sure, a few people who overspend to get a more fuel-efficient car will maintain their gasoline budget and take extra trips in it, but far more will take the money saved on fuel and spend it on other things. Sure, those things have their own energy costs, but a fancy Apple gizmo has far less embodied energy than the gasoline the owner saved. Besides, those wacky environmentalists spending $$$ to consume less energy are likely to spend some of the money saved on additional energy-saving measures.
Read the Wikipedia article more carefully, there are so many caveats and non-linearities that it really is a weak argument even before you consider individual consumers' motivations.
See my post elsewhere. Nissan probably invested 20x more in Leaf production than Fiat did in the 500e, so Nissan enjoys economy of scale. They claimed the Leaf is profitable in November 2013.
A Maserati Ghibli costs $66,900. The Fiat 500e is $24,800 if you quality for the full federal income tax credit of $7500, and even less with other incentives. Instructing strangers how to spend their money is not a good strategy, comrade.
Good summary except for this part
Toyota had a similar mindset as GM, but couldn't compete on ZEVs
No one tried to compete on EVs. GM spent money on the amazing EV1 but was never serious about promoting it and simultaneously lobbied to kill the ZEV mandate. Meanwhile the original Toyota RAV4 EV was a fine car and some happy pioneer owners are still running theirs because Toyota sold 300 of them instead of leasing, almost by accident.
Given the state of the art in electric vehicles I really don't see an electric vehicle being significantly profitable at less than $50,000 right now. There simply aren't enough of them out there to drive the unit costs down. I expect that number to fall over time but it will require investment by companies
Facts congruent with your last sentence disprove your first sentence. The Nissan Leaf sells around $29,000 (thus $22K if you get the EV tax credit) and in November 2013 Nissan claimed it is profitable. The difference between the Leaf and compliance cars like the Fiat 500e (and the Ford Focus EV, GM Spark EV, Honda Fit EV, Smart ED, Toyota RAV4 EV, etc., etc., etc.) is that Nissan has invested hundreds of millions in the Leaf, building its own battery plants near the production sites in USA, Europe, and Japan. Result: there were "34,000 Leafs on US roads today and 75,000 worldwide", and thousands more since then.
Maybe Fiat and all the other compliance car makers thought their component suppliers would magically sell them cheap battery packs, motors, inverters, on-board chargers, etc. That may come with standardization and aggregate volume, but Tesla and Nissan (and maybe BMW with its big investment in the i3 brand) have shown that to drive costs down, you make it yourself in volume and/or order tens of thousands of parts. Car companies grudgingly building 2,000 compliance cars over 3 years can STFU about costs.
and maybe some government subsidies here and there.
The tax credit for buying an EV is enough.
Power grids must always have excess capacity available or risk going down and most industrial sized power plants take hours to throttle up while usually providing very little storage capacity. ... we may be able to someday store electrical power and smooth out the uncertainly.
There's a fix for that: all the electrical energy stored in electric vehicle batteries. Hence the dozens of studies and pilot programs of Vehicle 2 Grid systems where the utility can work with its customers to meet peak demand. And just like rooftop solar, the customer is spending the $1000s per kWh capital costs, not the utility!
But just like rooftop solar, when it comes to a utility actually paying its customers instead of billing them... Does. Not. Compute. <Utility looks around wildly for government people to influence so it can raise rates>
Electric Utilities are heavily regulated. I am not sure about Oklahoma, but in many states the rate that utilities can charge is tied back to the cost of electric production
Sure, and the battles over the rates that utilities pay for customer-generated electricity are raging right now.
Since electric production tends to be capital intensive
But in this case the utility customers are putting up the money!! I blew $19,000 on solar panels, my utility got a new source of electrons for no money down! I'm taking on the risk for them!
Feeding electricity back into the grid is not a free lunch for the utilities – there are costs involved.
Well the utilities say that, but it's mostly fear-mongering. The wires they built to send electricity to my house will happily carry electricity in the other direction. And again, compared to building a new fossil fuel plant buying my excess instead of fueling a plant is easy money for the utilities.
(and I am sure that electric utilities will whine loudly in an exaggerated fashion as they fight a rearguard action.)
That's what this is all about. Most states have net metering: if the utility sells to me at 15/kWh , I can sell my excess to them at the same rate. It's currently a win for the utilities because they're getting electrons in the hot summer with minimal capital cost, but they're throwing up roadblocks and raising rates now in fear of a future where a significant percentage of their customers are selling to them. In a fair system they would pay me what they would pay to run a plant at that moment, less a transmission fee and plus a bonus that my electrons are low CO2. this month's Sierra Magazine lists state-by-state efforts to fight net metering, refuse to hook up new solar installations, etc. South Carolina sounds worse than Oklahoma, there "initial determination that rooftop-solar leases should be banned as unfair competition to the utility industry."
In a sane approach to limiting global warming, there would be taxes on fossil-generated electricity or (less ideally) carbon emissions trading, and the utilities would be trying to figure out how to decrease those costs. Well hey look, our customers are putting up their own capital to solve the problem for us!
It's a similar situation with V2G (Vehicle 2 Grid) to cope with demand spikes and brown-outs. Electrical vehicle owners could be a huge instantaneous reserve of electrons to avoid, without the capital and operational costs of having dirty peaker plants on standby. There have been dozens of studies of this, but again the electric utilities are allergic to the idea of paying their customers. Most owners would be willing to let the utility drain 20% of their battery, but not if they get nothing in return.
I naively hoped that the electric utilities would be happy about distributed renewable power generation and would evolve to work with customers who are also suppliers to their mutual benefit. But it turns out they're wedded to the idea of burning fossil fuels to make electricity to sell to us, and many are in bed with the fucking Koch brothers. But soon they'll need electrons more than people with renewables need them: "SolarCity is partnering with electric car company Tesla ... to store solar energy in battery packs for use at night, with a connection to the grid solely for backup."
* Marissa Mayer (2012–)
* Ross Levinsohn _Interim_ (2012)
* Scott Thompson (2012)
* Tim Morse _Interim_ (2011–2012)
* Carol Bartz (2009–2011)
* Jerry Yang (2007–2009)
after a string of recent short-tenured CEOs at Mozilla's helm.
Kovacs became CEO in 2010, and announced his departure in 2013, I think 7-year veteran Jay Sullivan has been acting CEO since then. Before that John Lilly was CEO for 2 years, taking over from Mitchell Baker who remains as Chairman. Two short-term CEOs in a row makes a pair, not a string.
People who don't like Firefox's six-week release cadence can quit bitching and run the Firefox Extended Support Release.
All the comments about H2 efficiency and explosive risk completely miss the point. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have been feasible for years, there have been a few Honda Clarity and Mercedes B-Class FCVs driving round Southern California (which has the ONLY public refueling stations in the entire USA) for several years.
The problem is demand. If you care about the environment you plug in for your regular commute. You can can already buy a plug-in hybrid for half the price and lower running costs than these 2015 cars. As Volt owners gleefully report, most drivers travel for hundreds of miles recharging at home, but for long trips the car has the quick refueling of gasoline that's available everywhere.
There's a market of people who don't want any tailpipe emissions and can't plug in and regularly drive long distances and live near the handful of H2 stations and are willing to spend a lot of money on a new technology, but it's vanishingly small!
Eventually fossil fuels could be so expensive or restricted that H2 will be the range-extender we use for our plug-in vehicles, if ethanol from biomass doesn't work out. But that's a long way away. Meanwhile Toyota and Hyundai are very cagey about whether you can plug in their HFCVs; it seems the answer is No. Their cars have a battery and motor so plugging in is the cheapest way to drive the first few miles, and I think soon consumers will reject a motor-driven car that you can't plug in. The comparative reviews of the first HFCVs against 2015's plug-in hybrid cars will be brutal, and there will be dozens of "gotcha" pieces, wherein the brave reporter drives out of Southern California and gets stranded.
The hydrogen combustion car is dead, dead. It combines the chicken-and-egg problems of hydrogen fuel distribution with all the inefficiency of blowing stuff up to make heat and a little forward motion. At least fuel cells are efficient.
The BMW 7 series and Mazda rotary hydrogen ICE demo cars came out years ago. Nothing serious since. Periodically some lame manufacturer without access to fuel cells or batteries converts an engine to burn hydrogen, but it's a stunt that goes nowhere.
The summary seems to imply that Gibson made the Matrix. No it doesn't, there's an "or" in there.
However, William Gibson never envisioned mind control in Virtual Reality either. You jacked in to cyberspace, a consensual hallucination of a graphic representation of data (which never took off, there's no "representation" of the net at all when you jump from Slashdot to YouTube), but Gibson explicitly had his hackers typing commands while jacked in: "distant fingers caressing the deck", "whip moves on those keyboards faster than you could follow", etc.
Gibson's Neuromancer follow-up Count Zero is stuffed with profoundly prescient ideas like fully-immersive telepresence and one of the first descriptions of hanging out with people's avatars in cyberspace, but the closest he comes to a "brain-computer interface" is slotting in a piece of microsoft behind your ear which gives you the knowledge to fly a real plane in physical reality. Similarly, in Spads & Fokkers (his short story with Michael Swanwick) players use a brain interface to control a holographic plane in a videogame: "He fitted the Batang behind his ear after coating the inductor surface with paste, jacked its fiberoptic ribbon into the programmer, ... when it was done, a sky-blue Spad darted restlessly through the air a few inches from his face. It almost glowed, it was so real. It had the strange inner life that fanatically detailed museum-grade models often have, but it took all of his concentration to keep it in existence. If his attention wavered at all, it lost focus, fuzzing into a pathetic blur."
In another comment undefinedreference says You could play a video game or work in a virtual environment while your body is essentially at the gym. Gibson foresaw that too, but “The street finds its own uses for things,” and so Rikki in Burning Chrome is "working three-hour shifts in an approximation of REM sleep, while her body and a bundle of conditioned reflexes took care of business. The customers never got to complain that she was faking it, because those were real orgasms. But she felt them, if she felt them at all, as faint silver flares somewhere out on the edge of sleep."
Gibson's ideas are masterful poetic riffs on the future, but they aren't its operating manual.
Oh STFU. If you come out with a neat piece of software that runs in a browser, you can post a link to it (like this one) and millions of people can run it in a single click because it's so damn easy. If your software is written in anything else but JavaScript, people have to screw around downloading runtimes and saving and executing binaries, and at best 5% as many people will bother trying it. Sure, an app store simplifies that, but now you have to build multiple app versions, iOS, Android, and whatever the hell Windows uses, and you've still left millions of potential users out.
It's the universal availability of JavaScript and zero-install that you get by running it in a web browser that drives the innovation and interest in it, and there's no sign of it stopping. Go build an OpenRISC emulator in C that's far better in every way than this, post a link to the installer, and watch your effort get ignored.
GCHQ designed by Gensler is 1.1M square feet for 4,600 staff. Apple is 2.8M square feet for 14,200.
Foster and Partners are a fantastic firm, their buildings are reliably masterpieces of design and engineering, and Sir Norman is arguably the greatest living architect, but they don't come cheap. The insanely great HSBC building was the most expensive building in the world in 1985.
As Anonymous Coward points out elsewhere, sharing a powertrain is NOT a rebadge. The ELR looks nothing like the Volt, therefore it is not a rebadge.
Well, what should happen when you lift off the accelerator? In a conventional car, the engine brakes the car, and engine braking increases in lower gears. So GM has reused the concept to adjust the amount of brake regen when you lift off. Other electrified cars coast, or apply a set amount of regen. I don't know what VW's new plug-in hybrids, with a conventional dual-clutch transmission, do.
Tesla hooks brake regen up to the accelerator pedal, so as you lift off more more brake regen increases, turning it into an accelerator/decelerator control. One-footed driving sounds like a blast.