I'm confused by 'The Big Three got their money *before* two of them were bailed out.' GM got an early $300M loan before bankruptcy, and there was talk of federal funds and loan guarantees near the end of 2008. But Google won't confirm tell if Bush's December 2008 $13.4 billion rescue loan for the American automakers actually occurred! I know the version that had all the blahblah about a new dawn of fuel-efficiency was blocked in the Senate. In the end the USA put $57 billion from TARP funds into taking over GM in bankruptcy, and "supported" Chrysler's sale to Fiat; if Detroit got big loans before that I don't know what happened to them.
They stopped making the $100K Model R's, which they sold profitably.
No, the Roadster is still being manufactured. In their initial SEC filing Tesla warned We do not plan to sell our current generation Tesla Roadster after 2011 due to planned tooling changes at a supplier for the Tesla Roadster.
The assumption was that Lotus is going to stop making the Elise chassis, but later Tesla clarified Responding to customer demand, Tesla has negotiated agreements with key suppliers that will increase total Roadster production by 40% and extend sales into 2012.
Also, you're the first person I've heard call the follow-on to the Model S (codename "Whitestar") the Model T. Tesla has been very quiet about that car, probably because Nissan will be cranking out hundreds of thousand of Nissan Leafs by then. Instead they're talking about a family of cars based on the Model S.
If you watch Tesla's informative roadshow, their CEO Deepak Ahuja talks about this. They think the 50 stores costing $1M each that Tesla are planning to open will be enough for them to sell 20,000 Model S a year, which they think will be profitable. That's only 400 cars per store a year.
He also says Tesla spent $125M and 6 years developing the Roadster and the Model S will only take $400M. So Tesla's previous funding and the DoE ATVM loan are enough to bring the Model S to market. The IPO and Toyota investment are gravy that lets them develop other models off the Model S platform. Obviously that's all roadshow happy talk, so reality will be different.
Are you serious? Those other cars pollute at a standstill, can't reclaim energy when braking or going downhill, get significantly worse MPG (and thus will consume TONS more gasoline and emit many TONS more CO2 over their lifespan), and aren't the most reliable midsize car model according to all of Consumer Reports/JD Power/Tru Delta surveys.
If you don't like it, then don't buy one but don't pretend the Prius is anything less than a fantastic engineering accomplishment. The 2009 model got bigger and faster, and yet its MPG *improved* to a USA-leading 50, which is mind-bending. If you sacrifice and buy a smaller, less practical, and/or slower new car, then you'll get *worse* MPG. And until you spend $109,000 for a Tesla Roadster, you can't get better MPG for more money.
"This loan" is from the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program a $25 billion direct loan program funded by Congress in fall 2008 to provide debt capital to the U.S. automotive industry for the purpose of funding projects that help vehicles manufactured in the U.S. meet higher millage requirements and lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil. This program is unrelated to the United States Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) which has been providing bailout funding [many billions!] to two of the big three U.S. automakers.
The loan commitments include a $5.9 billion loan to Ford for upgrading factories in five states to produce 13 more fuel-efficient models, a $1.6 billion loan to Nissan to build advanced electric vehicles and advanced batteries, and a $465 million loan to Tesla Motors to manufacture its new electric sedan. [and] a $528.7 million loan for Fisker Automotive for the development of two lines of plug-in hybrids by 2016
It has been speculated that at least two of the Big Three U.S. automobile manufacturers may not be able to qualify for this program because of its fuel economy and financial solvency requirements.
Also, a lot of analysis compares the efficiency of a gallon of gasoline in your tank moving your car with the efficiency of the fossil fuel from the power station recharging a battery to move your car. But the production, refining, and distribution of gasoline before it gets in the tank is itself very polluting and energy-intensive. Oil companies are very opaque about what their energy usage is.
vSpace is not VNC; NComputing claim their communication protocol UXB can handle USB as well (presumably devices you connect to the thin client) and they mention multimedia also. And the other piece of it is their Windows tinkering so that the TV desktop can be running a different account than the PC desktop, which is useful if the kids want to play Sims from the TV while you're doing taxes.
This is software NComputing claims to have developed for 12 years. It's a nice adjunct to their $20 ARM set-top chip. That chip runs Linux or Android, but vSpace lets you access your existing Windows apps and games remotely.
What is the computer you hook up to your TV? is a billion dollar question, with multiple answers. Its chip is a minor issue; how much storage, whether it has its own display, whether it has a remote, and whether you take it with you are far bigger issues. A smartphone with 64GB that you plug in over HDMI and a fixed PS3 with a wireless remote feel like the two big winners.
But if you don't standardize, rolling out a fast-charge infrastructure while you sip tea is much harder. Either recharge stations would be specific to particular car brands, or vehicles would need adapters; that's a lot more expensive at 400V and 50A than non-standard phone chargers.
CHAdeMO == TEPCO == high-voltage DC charging, and as I mentioned in another comment, on the Nissan Leaf this is in addition to its charging receptacle for the SAE J1772-2009 standard that USA and Japan have come up with for 120/240 AC charging.
A decade ago you recharged the incredible GM EV1 by inserting an inductive paddle, but "Magne Charge support was withdrawn by General Motors in 2002, after the California Air Resources Board settled on a conductive charging interface for electric vehicles in California" (Wikipedia). No standards body is contemplating inductive charging.
It looks like SAE J1772 will be the American and Japanese standard for level 1 (~120V AC) and level 2 (~220V AC) charging. (More accurately, this is the SAE J1772-2009 revision using the round connector developed by Yazaki. There is already a rectangular J1772 connector developed a decade ago, mostly made by AVCON, that the few hundreds of USA recharge stations and EVs have been using for years.) Tesla says they will retrofit their AC connector to J1772.
But for even faster charging while you have some tea, USA and Japan have decided need to send ~480V DC to the car. On reason given is that supplying any higher AC voltages would make on-board converters too heavy for the car, but it also could be that the residential supply in USA and Japan doesn't go that high. The SAE J1772 group is working on a level 3 high-voltage DC spec, but it's unclear whether the same connector can handle the power. The Nissan Leaf already has a separate DC charge port next to the J1772 connector, see some pictures. I think it and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV use the Japanese TEPCO design for DC, and Tokyo Electric Power Co is behind this CHAdeMO group.
Meanwhile in Europe some manufacturers are poised to to adopt the Mennekes connector, which can handle up to 400V AC three-phase and 63A; I'm not sure where they stand on DC charging. IEC 62196-2 seems a large set of standards for sending juice to a car, I don't know who's supporting it.
These specs are far more elaborate than electrical specifications and a physical connector. They have complicated signaling between the car and charger to indicate what voltages and currents can safely be transferred, timed protocols to turn on the juice, some transfer data during charge to indicate how it's progressing, the car can negotiate with Enron for a discount night-time rate, etc. I imagine you could make adapter cables between different standards, but I assume they would need smart firmware, or at least some way to signal "Just give me 208V AC and forget the protocols" dumbed-down mode.
The issue you miss is: Microsoft leapt ahead of Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect when they brought out Windows 3.... They were ready for the new environment (Lotus and WordPerfect were not)
And these other companies weren't ready for the new environment because Microsoft told all the other major software makers that the wonderful new operating system OS/2 and its Presentation Manager window system, developed by Microsoft and a soon-to-be-ass-reamed IBM, was the future and that everyone should port their advanced applications to that. At the time many people considered Windows just a DOS extender with some toy windowed apps and some nifty tricks on the i386 to run old programs, while everyone heralded OS/2 as the next generation.
"She has legs strong enough to use men as skis as well."
That's probably how The Athlete Whose Name Rhymes With Bonn visualizes the course. The forces on her thighs from the ruts in a turn are like carrying a piano in a crouch during an earthquake, so grinding ex-boyfriends under the balls of her feet keeps her in a tuck. (I attack bumps like I'm astride a pair of porpoises, driving them back under the snow each time they crest, but I'm a dainty slowpoke.)
TAWNRWB's line was BAD in several spots, probably because her bruised right shin was killing her, and she was still 0.6 seconds ahead of teammate Julia Mancuso. A sensational performance.
NBC commentator: "Julia Mancuso likes it rough and bumpy."
When I tried Google Pack I found it didn't bundle the latest versions of the software it installs, so several immediately had to download additional updates!
At one point my Windows PC had 7 different update programs running: Adobe Acrobat updater, Apple Updater, Flash updater, GoogleUpdate.exe and GoogleUpdaterService.exe, Java update (jusched.exe?), LavaSoft Ad-Aware updater, Symantec LiveUpdate (AluSchedulerSvc.exe?), ThinkVantage updater, Windows update. And that's after I turned off several others in MSCONFIG and Services.
Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla's Help > Check for Updates... is the best Windows updater. It only runs when the application runs, it downloads a minimal diff, it prompts you to restart the application and self-updates (unlike some updaters that make you re-run a ^%$#$@! full-blown uninstall/installation program and ask you stupid questions that make no sense in an update), and it doesn't leave megabytes of crap lying around (I had five 70MB Java versions in C:\Program Files\Java and more crap in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Java\Update\Base Images).
(I'm now on Kubuntu and KPackageKit, not perfect but an improvement in many ways.)
Nothing makes me shiver more than the attrocity known as the web browser becoming the primary application platform.
Wake up grandpa, it happened a few years ago. Apart from a few novel iPhone apps, all the inventive mass-market "applications" in the last few years have been things you run in the browser. As web sites get brave enough to treat MSIE as legacy crap and use HTML5 goodness like SVG and the canvas, audio and video tags, the web application advances will only accelerate. Bitch all you want about how you don't like the languages of the web, meanwhile everyone else does groundbreaking work that's immediately runnable by an audience of a few hundred million.
No one is proposing fast recharge at home. Tesla offers slow regular 110 V AC recharge, a dedicated 240 V AC high power connector for home, and an optional portable 240V cable; the theory is you'll be home for a while, and by the next morning your tank is full. Beyond that the upcoming Model S will also recharge from a specialized DC recharger running at around 440 V, and SAE is working on a standard design for high-voltage DC recharge. Only dedicated charging stations would have the specialized electric supply to support this.
Also note that with battery packs, the battery should not be discharged to 0%, because that would shorten battery life. So even a "full" recharge isn't pumping in all 53 kWh. On the other hand, fast recharge is less efficient, I think because you have to cool the battery pack.
the battery is fully charged for free from the solar panels
The solar panel roof option for the Prius only runs the air conditioner while you're away. You'd be lucky to get 2 kWh (about 25 cents) of electricity a day from solar panels that fit on a car (the sun isn't directly overhead for 8 hours, car surfaces aren't tilted to match northern latitudes, etc.). I think the Tesla goes about 4 miles per kWh. So your idea is intriguing, but not 5 Insightful, and impractical unless you have a short commute. There's a reason solar-powered cars look like enormous flat billboards on bicycle wheels with a hole for the driver's head.
Maybe you mean solar panels forming big solar carports over your parking space. That's another neat idea, but making a free-standing structure to support solar cells roughly doubles the cost. AFAIK no one is mass-producing solar carports, they're nifty design ideas or one-offs. Unless you're an off-the-grid survivalist, just put solar cells where they generate the most for the last amount of money (probably a nearby south-facing roof), and feed the electricity into the grid.
You're not thinking it through. Even if 100 pounds of lithium is shipped 20,000 miles to make your car, that's nothing compared to moving 3,000 pounds of car 150,000 miles over its lifetime. Besides, shipping goods by sea is very efficient per pound.
Some sites like whatgreencar.com try to compute the production of a car as well as its pollution in operation. But since all reputable studies suggest that 75-90% of lifetime energy use occurs in operation of a vehicle, not its production, weight and materials don't have much effect. The car that is more efficient is better for the environment, so adding batteries is better environmentally despite the increased weight. For those of us who can't afford a Tesla Roadster, the least bad car for the environment is the one with highest MPG.
Not according to benchmarks at cybernetnews, dotnetperls, ghacks, etc., which find it lower than Chrome, Opera, Safari, and IE especially as you open more tabs. Sounds like you have add-on issues.
I just upgraded a user from 1.1.18 to SeaMonkey 2, it went smoothly.
Finally, SVG support in browsers sucks complete ass.... Add animation or interactivity too it and you are in for a freaking world of pain.
Eh, it's not that bad for interactivity. Simple things like the FindTheCountry interactive geography quiz done entirely in one SVG file, and interactive map layers work in all good (non-IE) browsers. Animation through SMIL support seems pretty limited, but nowadays people are more likely to modify the SVG directly using DOM calls.
The <canvas> tag gets all the attention and awesome demos, but now there are JavaScript libraries like the Burst framework that can read in SVG elements and render and animate them. So an artist can create and name all the graphic assets in an SVG file, then a programmer pulls them out as needed.
Inkscape's fine for static SVG editing, but there are no good authoring tools for these animation and interactivity tricks. Furthermore many SVG demos on the web still use deprecated syntax to load SVG files.
No ads, worldwide news, works great over dial-up, is fantastic on a phone (no smartphone? Get Opera Mini for your idiotphone at http://operamini.com/ ). It crushes every other non-local mobile news source.
And in passing you'll learn who won the Ashes in cricket.
Chrysler, Ford, and GM all developed 70+ MPG prototypes around 2000, all three were diesel-hybrid. Follow that link for pictures
"On track to achieving its objectives, the program was cancelled by the Bush Administration in 2001 at the request of the automakers, with some of its aspects shifted to the much more distant FreedomCAR program."
Research continued with USCAR and USABC and now the DoE battery grants, but the wasted years... Arggghhh!
I alternate between Windows XP and Kubuntu Jaunty with a shared Firefox profile on an NTFS drive, and 90% of the time all I see is minor changes in the task bar underneath Firefox.
(The other 10% I enjoy a better console and alternate between loving and hating Linux packaging.)
Slashdot Mirror
The Big 3 didn't get ATVM loans, only Ford has.
I'm confused by 'The Big Three got their money *before* two of them were bailed out.' GM got an early $300M loan before bankruptcy, and there was talk of federal funds and loan guarantees near the end of 2008. But Google won't confirm tell if Bush's December 2008 $13.4 billion rescue loan for the American automakers actually occurred! I know the version that had all the blahblah about a new dawn of fuel-efficiency was blocked in the Senate. In the end the USA put $57 billion from TARP funds into taking over GM in bankruptcy, and "supported" Chrysler's sale to Fiat; if Detroit got big loans before that I don't know what happened to them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_Chapter_11_reorganization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Chapter_11_reorganization
No, the Roadster is still being manufactured. In their initial SEC filing Tesla warned We do not plan to sell our current generation Tesla Roadster after 2011 due to planned tooling changes at a supplier for the Tesla Roadster.
The assumption was that Lotus is going to stop making the Elise chassis, but later Tesla clarified Responding to customer demand, Tesla has negotiated agreements with key suppliers that will increase total Roadster production by 40% and extend sales into 2012.
Also, you're the first person I've heard call the follow-on to the Model S (codename "Whitestar") the Model T. Tesla has been very quiet about that car, probably because Nissan will be cranking out hundreds of thousand of Nissan Leafs by then. Instead they're talking about a family of cars based on the Model S.
So ultimatley the target market appears to be people with more money than sense;
What exactly is wrong with spending $60,000 on a nice-looking car that doesn't burn gasoline? Jealous much?
If you watch Tesla's informative roadshow, their CEO Deepak Ahuja talks about this. They think the 50 stores costing $1M each that Tesla are planning to open will be enough for them to sell 20,000 Model S a year, which they think will be profitable. That's only 400 cars per store a year.
He also says Tesla spent $125M and 6 years developing the Roadster and the Model S will only take $400M. So Tesla's previous funding and the DoE ATVM loan are enough to bring the Model S to market. The IPO and Toyota investment are gravy that lets them develop other models off the Model S platform. Obviously that's all roadshow happy talk, so reality will be different.
http://www.retailroadshow.com/roadshows.asp (note this site intentionally restricts access to a few well-known browsers and versions, bozos).
Are you serious? Those other cars pollute at a standstill, can't reclaim energy when braking or going downhill, get significantly worse MPG (and thus will consume TONS more gasoline and emit many TONS more CO2 over their lifespan), and aren't the most reliable midsize car model according to all of Consumer Reports/JD Power/Tru Delta surveys.
If you don't like it, then don't buy one but don't pretend the Prius is anything less than a fantastic engineering accomplishment. The 2009 model got bigger and faster, and yet its MPG *improved* to a USA-leading 50, which is mind-bending. If you sacrifice and buy a smaller, less practical, and/or slower new car, then you'll get *worse* MPG. And until you spend $109,000 for a Tesla Roadster, you can't get better MPG for more money.
"This loan" is from the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program
a $25 billion direct loan program funded by Congress in fall 2008 to provide debt capital to the U.S. automotive industry for the purpose of funding projects that help vehicles manufactured in the U.S. meet higher millage requirements and lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil. This program is unrelated to the United States Treasury Department's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) which has been providing bailout funding [many billions!] to two of the big three U.S. automakers.
The loan commitments include a $5.9 billion loan to Ford for upgrading factories in five states to produce 13 more fuel-efficient models, a $1.6 billion loan to Nissan to build advanced electric vehicles and advanced batteries, and a $465 million loan to Tesla Motors to manufacture its new electric sedan. [and] a $528.7 million loan for Fisker Automotive for the development of two lines of plug-in hybrids by 2016
It has been speculated that at least two of the Big Three U.S. automobile manufacturers may not be able to qualify for this program because of its fuel economy and financial solvency requirements.
Wikipedia is a wonderful thing
Also, a lot of analysis compares the efficiency of a gallon of gasoline in your tank moving your car with the efficiency of the fossil fuel from the power station recharging a battery to move your car. But the production, refining, and distribution of gasoline before it gets in the tank is itself very polluting and energy-intensive. Oil companies are very opaque about what their energy usage is.
vSpace is not VNC; NComputing claim their communication protocol UXB can handle USB as well (presumably devices you connect to the thin client) and they mention multimedia also. And the other piece of it is their Windows tinkering so that the TV desktop can be running a different account than the PC desktop, which is useful if the kids want to play Sims from the TV while you're doing taxes.
This is software NComputing claims to have developed for 12 years. It's a nice adjunct to their $20 ARM set-top chip. That chip runs Linux or Android, but vSpace lets you access your existing Windows apps and games remotely.
What is the computer you hook up to your TV? is a billion dollar question, with multiple answers. Its chip is a minor issue; how much storage, whether it has its own display, whether it has a remote, and whether you take it with you are far bigger issues. A smartphone with 64GB that you plug in over HDMI and a fixed PS3 with a wireless remote feel like the two big winners.
But if you don't standardize, rolling out a fast-charge infrastructure while you sip tea is much harder. Either recharge stations would be specific to particular car brands, or vehicles would need adapters; that's a lot more expensive at 400V and 50A than non-standard phone chargers.
CHAdeMO == TEPCO == high-voltage DC charging, and as I mentioned in another comment, on the Nissan Leaf this is in addition to its charging receptacle for the SAE J1772-2009 standard that USA and Japan have come up with for 120/240 AC charging.
A decade ago you recharged the incredible GM EV1 by inserting an inductive paddle, but "Magne Charge support was withdrawn by General Motors in 2002, after the California Air Resources Board settled on a conductive charging interface for electric vehicles in California" (Wikipedia). No standards body is contemplating inductive charging.
It looks like SAE J1772 will be the American and Japanese standard for level 1 (~120V AC) and level 2 (~220V AC) charging. (More accurately, this is the SAE J1772-2009 revision using the round connector developed by Yazaki. There is already a rectangular J1772 connector developed a decade ago, mostly made by AVCON, that the few hundreds of USA recharge stations and EVs have been using for years.) Tesla says they will retrofit their AC connector to J1772.
But for even faster charging while you have some tea, USA and Japan have decided need to send ~480V DC to the car. On reason given is that supplying any higher AC voltages would make on-board converters too heavy for the car, but it also could be that the residential supply in USA and Japan doesn't go that high. The SAE J1772 group is working on a level 3 high-voltage DC spec, but it's unclear whether the same connector can handle the power. The Nissan Leaf already has a separate DC charge port next to the J1772 connector, see some pictures. I think it and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV use the Japanese TEPCO design for DC, and Tokyo Electric Power Co is behind this CHAdeMO group.
Meanwhile in Europe some manufacturers are poised to to adopt the Mennekes connector, which can handle up to 400V AC three-phase and 63A; I'm not sure where they stand on DC charging. IEC 62196-2 seems a large set of standards for sending juice to a car, I don't know who's supporting it.
These specs are far more elaborate than electrical specifications and a physical connector. They have complicated signaling between the car and charger to indicate what voltages and currents can safely be transferred, timed protocols to turn on the juice, some transfer data during charge to indicate how it's progressing, the car can negotiate with Enron for a discount night-time rate, etc. I imagine you could make adapter cables between different standards, but I assume they would need smart firmware, or at least some way to signal "Just give me 208V AC and forget the protocols" dumbed-down mode.
The issue you miss is: Microsoft leapt ahead of Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect when they brought out Windows 3. ... They were ready for the new environment (Lotus and WordPerfect were not)
And these other companies weren't ready for the new environment because Microsoft told all the other major software makers that the wonderful new operating system OS/2 and its Presentation Manager window system, developed by Microsoft and a soon-to-be-ass-reamed IBM, was the future and that everyone should port their advanced applications to that. At the time many people considered Windows just a DOS extender with some toy windowed apps and some nifty tricks on the i386 to run old programs, while everyone heralded OS/2 as the next generation.
Pure underhand bastard marketing genius, read more about it.
That sounds as expected to me. If you have limited rights you can't install or update software, unless you installed it in your own directory.
Anyway, the bugs are filed and Mozilla is working on making it better, see the comments from Robert S. in the thread http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1587505
"She has legs strong enough to use men as skis as well."
That's probably how The Athlete Whose Name Rhymes With Bonn visualizes the course. The forces on her thighs from the ruts in a turn are like carrying a piano in a crouch during an earthquake, so grinding ex-boyfriends under the balls of her feet keeps her in a tuck. (I attack bumps like I'm astride a pair of porpoises, driving them back under the snow each time they crest, but I'm a dainty slowpoke.)
TAWNRWB's line was BAD in several spots, probably because her bruised right shin was killing her, and she was still 0.6 seconds ahead of teammate Julia Mancuso. A sensational performance.
NBC commentator: "Julia Mancuso likes it rough and bumpy."
When I tried Google Pack I found it didn't bundle the latest versions of the software it installs, so several immediately had to download additional updates!
At one point my Windows PC had 7 different update programs running: Adobe Acrobat updater, Apple Updater, Flash updater, GoogleUpdate.exe and GoogleUpdaterService.exe, Java update (jusched.exe?), LavaSoft Ad-Aware updater, Symantec LiveUpdate (AluSchedulerSvc.exe?), ThinkVantage updater, Windows update. And that's after I turned off several others in MSCONFIG and Services.
Firefox/Thunderbird/Mozilla's Help > Check for Updates... is the best Windows updater. It only runs when the application runs, it downloads a minimal diff, it prompts you to restart the application and self-updates (unlike some updaters that make you re-run a ^%$#$@! full-blown uninstall/installation program and ask you stupid questions that make no sense in an update), and it doesn't leave megabytes of crap lying around (I had five 70MB Java versions in C:\Program Files\Java and more crap in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Java\Update\Base Images).
(I'm now on Kubuntu and KPackageKit, not perfect but an improvement in many ways.)
Nothing makes me shiver more than the attrocity known as the web browser becoming the primary application platform.
Wake up grandpa, it happened a few years ago. Apart from a few novel iPhone apps, all the inventive mass-market "applications" in the last few years have been things you run in the browser. As web sites get brave enough to treat MSIE as legacy crap and use HTML5 goodness like SVG and the canvas, audio and video tags, the web application advances will only accelerate. Bitch all you want about how you don't like the languages of the web, meanwhile everyone else does groundbreaking work that's immediately runnable by an audience of a few hundred million.
No one is proposing fast recharge at home. Tesla offers slow regular 110 V AC recharge, a dedicated 240 V AC high power connector for home, and an optional portable 240V cable; the theory is you'll be home for a while, and by the next morning your tank is full. Beyond that the upcoming Model S will also recharge from a specialized DC recharger running at around 440 V, and SAE is working on a standard design for high-voltage DC recharge. Only dedicated charging stations would have the specialized electric supply to support this.
Also note that with battery packs, the battery should not be discharged to 0%, because that would shorten battery life. So even a "full" recharge isn't pumping in all 53 kWh. On the other hand, fast recharge is less efficient, I think because you have to cool the battery pack.
the battery is fully charged for free from the solar panels
The solar panel roof option for the Prius only runs the air conditioner while you're away. You'd be lucky to get 2 kWh (about 25 cents) of electricity a day from solar panels that fit on a car (the sun isn't directly overhead for 8 hours, car surfaces aren't tilted to match northern latitudes, etc.). I think the Tesla goes about 4 miles per kWh. So your idea is intriguing, but not 5 Insightful, and impractical unless you have a short commute. There's a reason solar-powered cars look like enormous flat billboards on bicycle wheels with a hole for the driver's head.
Maybe you mean solar panels forming big solar carports over your parking space. That's another neat idea, but making a free-standing structure to support solar cells roughly doubles the cost. AFAIK no one is mass-producing solar carports, they're nifty design ideas or one-offs. Unless you're an off-the-grid survivalist, just put solar cells where they generate the most for the last amount of money (probably a nearby south-facing roof), and feed the electricity into the grid.
You're not thinking it through. Even if 100 pounds of lithium is shipped 20,000 miles to make your car, that's nothing compared to moving 3,000 pounds of car 150,000 miles over its lifetime. Besides, shipping goods by sea is very efficient per pound.
Some sites like whatgreencar.com try to compute the production of a car as well as its pollution in operation. But since all reputable studies suggest that 75-90% of lifetime energy use occurs in operation of a vehicle, not its production, weight and materials don't have much effect. The car that is more efficient is better for the environment, so adding batteries is better environmentally despite the increased weight. For those of us who can't afford a Tesla Roadster, the least bad car for the environment is the one with highest MPG.
Firefox is still a huge memory hog
Not according to benchmarks at cybernetnews, dotnetperls, ghacks, etc., which find it lower than Chrome, Opera, Safari, and IE especially as you open more tabs. Sounds like you have add-on issues.
I just upgraded a user from 1.1.18 to SeaMonkey 2, it went smoothly.
Finally, SVG support in browsers sucks complete ass. ... Add animation or interactivity too it and you are in for a freaking world of pain.
Eh, it's not that bad for interactivity. Simple things like the FindTheCountry interactive geography quiz done entirely in one SVG file, and interactive map layers work in all good (non-IE) browsers. Animation through SMIL support seems pretty limited, but nowadays people are more likely to modify the SVG directly using DOM calls.
The <canvas> tag gets all the attention and awesome demos, but now there are JavaScript libraries like the Burst framework that can read in SVG elements and render and animate them. So an artist can create and name all the graphic assets in an SVG file, then a programmer pulls them out as needed.
Inkscape's fine for static SVG editing, but there are no good authoring tools for these animation and interactivity tricks. Furthermore many SVG demos on the web still use deprecated syntax to load SVG files.
Bookmark http://news.bbc.co.uk/low
No ads, worldwide news, works great over dial-up, is fantastic on a phone (no smartphone? Get Opera Mini for your idiotphone at http://operamini.com/ ). It crushes every other non-local mobile news source.
And in passing you'll learn who won the Ashes in cricket.
"never did not do a final transfer of copyright"
Can you explain your double negative to us?
How quickly people forget the Clinton-era Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles.
Chrysler, Ford, and GM all developed 70+ MPG prototypes around 2000, all three were diesel-hybrid. Follow that link for pictures
"On track to achieving its objectives, the program was cancelled by the Bush Administration in 2001 at the request of the automakers, with some of its aspects shifted to the much more distant FreedomCAR program."
Research continued with USCAR and USABC and now the DoE battery grants, but the wasted years... Arggghhh!
"East Asians participants tended to focus on the eyes of the other person"
I could have told you that just from watching kung fu movies.
I alternate between Windows XP and Kubuntu Jaunty with a shared Firefox profile on an NTFS drive, and 90% of the time all I see is minor changes in the task bar underneath Firefox.
(The other 10% I enjoy a better console and alternate between loving and hating Linux packaging.)