There are lots of these things on Aliexpress.com from a wide variety of sellers. Most of the reviews are from Russia but most of the models seems to have good ratings. Inexpensive and most of them do 1080p for less than $150. Depending on what features you can do without, you can get 1080p at less than $100. If you are wary of GPS data incriminating yourself, get a model without it. Some models you can turn it off.
Guess I should invest in one of them fancy maglev fans.
If you are shooting for quietness, it may not be worth it. Unless there is something wrong with the motor, 90% of the noise in a fan should be coming from the air inefficiencies of the fan.
Also, Lockheed is a very big, very old company with layers of bereaucracy. The bigger the organization, the more bureaucracy is needed, and the more expensive their wares become. Spaxe-X is still young and lean.
Not only that, but their engineering processes are terrible. I had the misfortune of working with them on the replacement for the Alvin submarine. Instead of looking for things which could be purchased off the shelf, they seemed to go out of their way to design completely new parts and write completely new software when an ideally-suited commercial package would have been more functional than the programming garbage they produced. Maybe this is coming from higher up to inflate costs and chargeback to the customer. I certainly found it ridiculous though.
A couple years ago I had to obtain a TWIC card. When I went to the office to have my biometrics done, all the equipment was branded "Lockheed". And none of it worked right, turning what should have been a 5 minute trip into a 1 hour ordeal. There was about 10 different devices on the clerk's desk, when 3 should have sufficed (scanner, fingerprint reader, camera). There are dozens of companies which make secure badging and identifying products. Lockheed's pile of garbage probably cost 100x as much and isn't as good.
Say you buy a small steam turbine because you need extraction steam as part of a heating process. Every OEM I can think of uses a dedicated controller to control overspeed protection, load control, overtemperature control, temperature mismatch lockouts, etc. BUT they all use proprietary Windows software to interface with that controller.
Many industrial pieces of equipment along your process work like this. Proprietary PID controller with access to it via Windows. Are you going to write custom software for every single piece of equipment along the whole process? Keep in mind that it took the OEM several years to write, test, and refine their software to the point where their equipment is reliable and safe.
The UN in general/can/ agree on Syria, it's just that Russia and China have their vetoes on the Security Council and used them to protect the Assad regime..
So you're saying they can't agree then. Russia and China are permanent members of the security council, you need all the security council votes to get anything done, so nothing will be done.
And even if you did get them to agree, the UN is the weakest and most ineffective security/military organization ever. They can't stop genocide in Rwanda and the Congo when they have tens of thousands of troops in a country. How are they going to stop a country from launching a couple rockets when they have nobody [or a handful] of people in the country?
You think North Korea cares about the UN? The UN can't agree that the Syrian government should be sanctioned. For launching a missile, the UN might decide to write a weakly worded statement that future misbehaving might incur a more strongly worded letter. Maybe. After weeks of negotiations and diplomacy.
It's the line of space wasted by having mostly empty tool bars and docks stretching across the bottom or top of the screen.
It's why when I get stuck with a 16:9 monitor I dock everything to the left side.
The wasted space is bad, but comparing monitors becomes bad too. A 21:9 monitor which is 29" has a lot less area than a 29" monitor at 16:9 which in turn has a lot less area than a 29" monitor at 4:3. A marketer's wet dream probably, but terrible for the consumer.
This 22:9 monitor which is 29" is about 11" high in usable area. My 21" 16:9 monitor at work is about 10.3" high in usable area.
A 22:9 monitor at 29" only has the area of a 26.5" monitor at 16:9 or a 24.8" monitor at 4:3.
So they don't use landmarks, no signals like lighthouses no depthsfinders etc?
How exactly should it work to drive by GPS?
There is a distinction between positioning and navigation. Perhaps I should have been more clear. Positioning is almost always done by GPS nowadays, with visual cues taken where available. Navigation uses your position, speed, heading, current, wind direction, etc to find your way from A to B. On ships, they use differential GPS with an accuracy of a couple of inches in many cases. The receivers will tell you the accuracy that they have at the moment- it comes out of the calculations for determining GPS position as a kind of "remainder" similar to long division. Determining position by GPS is not retarded. It is the cheapest, easiest, most reliable way to determine position. To not use it to determine position given the other options would be silly.
Having gone to a maritime school, a lot of my friends are on the bridge of large ships. A lot.
They can go without it, but GPS is so easy, convenient, and reliable that they basically rely on it. Shooting the stars with a sextant is relegated to trainees and practicing for the various exams which are required to be promoted to second mate, first mate, and finally master.
If we're so worried about China getting our jet engine tech (and we probably should be), then why is GE allowed to be in a joint Chinese venture to make engines?
GE has a long history of doing this. They licensed their steam turbines to Toshiba as early as the 1970's (and still maintain a joint venture with them). Then they licensed them to Hitachi. Recently, they have been playing the game with Doosan (Korean multinational).
I wouldn't worry too much about stealing gas turbine technology though. This is basically a mature technology now with only incremental improvements every couple years. If you wanted to play the gas turbine game, stealing an engine or 5 would help, but it would be cheaper and less risky to just send people to the various conferences on such technologies throughout the year. In this industry, the secret design is important, but the manufacturing capability and production engineering is more important. If you just steal an engine you still have a long way to go.
If you were starting a gas turbine program from scratch, you would need a big pile of money (500 million would probably do it), some engineers skilled in thermodynamics, separate engineers skilled in materials, production engineers, etc. You can have GE, Siemens, Alstom, and Rolls Royce's engineers defect to you if you want it bad enough (money and benefits talk loudly in this industry). Then you need to locate a supplier of exotic alloys and large forgings (not as difficult as it sounds), buy some 5 axis CNC machines for airfoils and some larger vertical tables and lathes for the rotors and casings. Get yourself some machinists and millwrights and you're in business. This is out of reach of a small or medium size company, but a Fortune 500 company or medium-size government could do it if they wanted it badly enough.
The cheap domain host I use provides a choice of Atmail Open, Horde, Roundcube, and Squirrelmail. Of those, I always use Atmail Open. Horde and Roundcube don't seem so bad, Atmail is just more my preference. Squirrelmail is archaic and awful.
Care to back any of that up? I was going to mod the whole thing troll but without explaining why it might have seemed I was modding -1, different opinion.
Heat pipes produce little energy and are very expensive to install.
They are expensive, but they are effectively your "fuel" cost. You have to keep drilling wells but that beats mining coal in my opinion.
Limited geothermal sources have led some to consider fracking, which is considered to have caused a quake in France IIRC. They were considering doing the same kind of fracking here near The Geysers in Lake County, CA but they were chased out of town after that.
Using the term "fracking" is inflamatory and not what was proposed or done. Geothermal plants inject water into the ground, not a concoction of nasty chemicals that don't have to be identified.
The facility at The Geysers uses turbines made by Halliburton, which is evil.
This is just wrong. I think I have seen you post this before. Almost all the Geysers turbines were supplied by Toshiba (sorry PDF), with a couple of older ones having been supplied by GE. Toshiba deals directly with Calpine and Haliburton isn't involved at all. I think this is just more inflamatory BS.
The facility at The Geysers has a big concrete pit over which they wash the turbines, because stuff like Arsenic (and other interesting things) comes out of the vent. After the pit fills up with crap they cover it over, raise the wall, and keep going. They're building a highly concentrated layer cake of toxics that one day will probably be broken open by seismic activity, This is an improvement over the former situation of putting slurry in drums and burying them. The drums broke open and we had two-headed cows being born and shit like that. They dug them up and reburied them on top of a plastic liner so that we could have the same problem again in forty years.
It is true that very nasty chemicals come up from the ground, but these are dealt with according to EPA standards. If they weren't, the EPA would fine them info oblivion. This is one of the few points I don't have detailed knowledge of, but I have been at places that were not in EPA compliance and the EPA came down on them hard and fast. Based on the incorrectness of your other points, I would have to assume this is factually suspect at best.
Atop all of this, the facility at The Geysers is perpetually under production targets, and over budget.
I would like to see a source for this. You don't mention if they are profitable or not. And why does that matter anyhow? Calpine is a publicly traded company, they can set whatever internal targets and budgets they like. It doesn't affect anybody except stockholders.
An unregulated currency plagued by theft and controlled by an elite cabal of basement-dwelling enthusiasts who can afford the thousands of dollars worth of hardware to drive smaller players out of the market. I'm sure nothing will go wrong.
In this way, this "technilogical mining rush" follows the follows the development of every other mining rush. A few individuals get rich in the beginning, then other people show up but make very little in comparison. Big outfits show up later and it becomes uneconomical for the little guys to play.
(those door open buttons are hard to find in a hurry sometimes. I believe there's even a paper on it)
In most of the elevators I have used in the US, they don't even work. I am really suspicious that they are even connected to anything and are just there as a placebo. Other countries don't seem to have a problem with this and the door close button closes the door.
5 x energy density of current commercial batteries is not at all in conflict with the laws of physics.
It flies in the face of over 100 years of historical data to have this much battery improvement in 5 years. Battery technology has historically improved by about 5% per year. To get a 5x improvement would take about 34 years barring some earth-shattering discovery the likes of which we have not seen in the past century. The goal of 5x improvement in 5 years seems hopelessly optimistic!
From a chemistry point of view, we are running into a problem too. We are already using the best metal theoretically possible based on chemical reactions and the table of elements (Lithium). We have run out of periodic table. Improvements recently have focused on novel geometries and other tricks.
I believe magnets are the biggest issue or more specifically rare earth magnets. Batteries are great but we'll need efficient motors to go with them and that requires rare earth minerals which are in heavy demand and tightly controlled.
There is no reason you can't use an electromagnet to play the role of "magnet" in a motor or generator. In the large generator world we call this static excitation or brushless excitation depending on the design. Static excitation uses a small permanent magnet generator to flash the field (electromagnet rotor), but brushless excitation systems only employ steel, copper, capacitors, rectifiers, and thyristors to excite the rotor.
I have one of these unpowered antennas. It boosted my signal by about 2 bars (out of 5) on average.
My company has some field engineers who frequently spend time inside construction trailers (usually steel ones like this which are then located inside steel buildings. Their work is never near a metropolitan area and usually in the middle of nowhere with poor cell reception. They use the more expensive antenna+powered amplifier systems and can usually get a usable signal even when I can't.
I have the 49g, the 35s, and the 33s. I used the 49g in college and bought both the 35s and 33s for the Professional Engineering (PE) exam.
The 49g is a fairly nice calculator, but it is so big that I rarely use it. Having multiple lines helps keep track of very lengthy RPN calculations. The 33s I could probably do without- it is obviously build to lower build quality standards than the 35s and is slightly more difficult to use. I only got it as a backup in the unlikely event my 35s died during the PE exam (PE exam is serious business). You can play with the free android app "Droid48" to get a feel for the 49g. The HP 48 series is very similar to the 49 series. It depends on why you are upgrading but I would either stick with what you have or get a 35s.
Yes that birds eye (45 degree) shot does look clearer than Google.
However Google kicks their butt by a big margin (IMHO) for top down view.
I have no clue how they have clear 45 degree footage but over sharpened rubbish for top down.
Some of their imagery is from airplanes. It is fairly obvious which are airplanes and which are satellite. They do some stupid and crude "give it some 3d depth!" processing which ruins the clarity of the sat photos. It can be turned off it you play with the settings.
$200 doesn't seem too bad for a GPS that integrates with your car electronics completely and seamlessly. No real worries about theft. No stupid suction cup mounts obstructing your visibility. No bean bag mount falling down under high acceleration and cracking the screen (one of my GPS' died this way). No specialty vent mounts breaking bits of plastic in your car.
Find another dealer or figure out what part number it is and call their parts department up and order the thing.
Mechanical tools: screwdrivers, wrench kit, pliers, cutters (plier style), cutters (x-acto), hammer, metal file (to round an odd sharp corner), tape measure, heavy-duty duct tape, lots of plastic cable ties. I also needed a drill to install an odd rack shelf, so throw one with some drilling bits if your budget allows. I don't know what cables you use, but tools to fix cabling may come in handy (multimeter, soldering iron and solder, shrinkable tubes, special tool to terminate cables, etc.). If you have fiber optics, get a good push-action connector cleaner.
Did you need to thread that hole too? I bought the cheapest set of chinese taps money can buy thinking they would be used once. I have been surprised at how many times I have used them.
$6000 for a dongle is pretty bad but arguably there is some special sauce or secret things inside the dongle. Any salesperson could concoct a convincing argument justifying it somehow. Until recently, our steam turbine controllers had a $400 backup battery for the memory. It was a 3.6v lithium AA-sized battery with a fancy connector soldered to both terminals and shrink wrapped. It became such a sore point that some more customer-oriented salespeople just pointed the customers to the correct digikey part.
So, if I'm a random security researcher, how do I get my hands on these SCADA systems to test them? They certainly aren't open source, and I'm guessing they aren't cheap. I doubt you can just type a credit card number into GE's web site and download one. How do they get one to look at?
I believe you have just nailed their security through obscurity philosophy. Only organizations with a small pile of cash, the right connections, or existing industry experience are able to play with these toys. This isn't something script kiddies can do.... yet. Sure you can break into a Duke Energy's VPN, and maybe they are stupid enough to still have control software on their internal non-control network. But you probably wouldn't know how to get started with controlling anything unless you had prior industry experience.
If you have prior industry experience, companies are practically falling over themselves to give you a 6 figure paycheck so illegal activities aren't that appealing.
Slashdot Mirror
There are lots of these things on Aliexpress.com from a wide variety of sellers. Most of the reviews are from Russia but most of the models seems to have good ratings. Inexpensive and most of them do 1080p for less than $150. Depending on what features you can do without, you can get 1080p at less than $100. If you are wary of GPS data incriminating yourself, get a model without it. Some models you can turn it off.
Guess I should invest in one of them fancy maglev fans.
If you are shooting for quietness, it may not be worth it. Unless there is something wrong with the motor, 90% of the noise in a fan should be coming from the air inefficiencies of the fan.
Also, Lockheed is a very big, very old company with layers of bereaucracy. The bigger the organization, the more bureaucracy is needed, and the more expensive their wares become. Spaxe-X is still young and lean.
Not only that, but their engineering processes are terrible. I had the misfortune of working with them on the replacement for the Alvin submarine. Instead of looking for things which could be purchased off the shelf, they seemed to go out of their way to design completely new parts and write completely new software when an ideally-suited commercial package would have been more functional than the programming garbage they produced. Maybe this is coming from higher up to inflate costs and chargeback to the customer. I certainly found it ridiculous though.
A couple years ago I had to obtain a TWIC card. When I went to the office to have my biometrics done, all the equipment was branded "Lockheed". And none of it worked right, turning what should have been a 5 minute trip into a 1 hour ordeal. There was about 10 different devices on the clerk's desk, when 3 should have sufficed (scanner, fingerprint reader, camera). There are dozens of companies which make secure badging and identifying products. Lockheed's pile of garbage probably cost 100x as much and isn't as good.
It isn't so easy.
Say you buy a small steam turbine because you need extraction steam as part of a heating process. Every OEM I can think of uses a dedicated controller to control overspeed protection, load control, overtemperature control, temperature mismatch lockouts, etc. BUT they all use proprietary Windows software to interface with that controller.
Many industrial pieces of equipment along your process work like this. Proprietary PID controller with access to it via Windows. Are you going to write custom software for every single piece of equipment along the whole process? Keep in mind that it took the OEM several years to write, test, and refine their software to the point where their equipment is reliable and safe.
that or Microsoft offered it for free or is paying for it just to get the publicity.
I'm fine with that. Bing web search might suck but Bing maps are really Nokia maps. Which are quite good. Better than Google maps in some cases.
The UN in general /can/ agree on Syria, it's just that Russia and China have their vetoes on the Security Council and used them to protect the Assad regime. .
So you're saying they can't agree then. Russia and China are permanent members of the security council, you need all the security council votes to get anything done, so nothing will be done.
And even if you did get them to agree, the UN is the weakest and most ineffective security/military organization ever. They can't stop genocide in Rwanda and the Congo when they have tens of thousands of troops in a country. How are they going to stop a country from launching a couple rockets when they have nobody [or a handful] of people in the country?
You think North Korea cares about the UN? The UN can't agree that the Syrian government should be sanctioned. For launching a missile, the UN might decide to write a weakly worded statement that future misbehaving might incur a more strongly worded letter. Maybe. After weeks of negotiations and diplomacy.
It's the line of space wasted by having mostly empty tool bars and docks stretching across the bottom or top of the screen.
It's why when I get stuck with a 16:9 monitor I dock everything to the left side.
The wasted space is bad, but comparing monitors becomes bad too. A 21:9 monitor which is 29" has a lot less area than a 29" monitor at 16:9 which in turn has a lot less area than a 29" monitor at 4:3. A marketer's wet dream probably, but terrible for the consumer.
This 22:9 monitor which is 29" is about 11" high in usable area. My 21" 16:9 monitor at work is about 10.3" high in usable area.
A 22:9 monitor at 29" only has the area of a 26.5" monitor at 16:9 or a 24.8" monitor at 4:3.
So they don't use landmarks, no signals like lighthouses no depthsfinders etc? How exactly should it work to drive by GPS?
There is a distinction between positioning and navigation. Perhaps I should have been more clear. Positioning is almost always done by GPS nowadays, with visual cues taken where available. Navigation uses your position, speed, heading, current, wind direction, etc to find your way from A to B. On ships, they use differential GPS with an accuracy of a couple of inches in many cases. The receivers will tell you the accuracy that they have at the moment- it comes out of the calculations for determining GPS position as a kind of "remainder" similar to long division. Determining position by GPS is not retarded. It is the cheapest, easiest, most reliable way to determine position. To not use it to determine position given the other options would be silly.
Having gone to a maritime school, a lot of my friends are on the bridge of large ships. A lot.
They can go without it, but GPS is so easy, convenient, and reliable that they basically rely on it. Shooting the stars with a sextant is relegated to trainees and practicing for the various exams which are required to be promoted to second mate, first mate, and finally master.
If we're so worried about China getting our jet engine tech (and we probably should be), then why is GE allowed to be in a joint Chinese venture to make engines?
GE has a long history of doing this. They licensed their steam turbines to Toshiba as early as the 1970's (and still maintain a joint venture with them). Then they licensed them to Hitachi. Recently, they have been playing the game with Doosan (Korean multinational).
I wouldn't worry too much about stealing gas turbine technology though. This is basically a mature technology now with only incremental improvements every couple years. If you wanted to play the gas turbine game, stealing an engine or 5 would help, but it would be cheaper and less risky to just send people to the various conferences on such technologies throughout the year. In this industry, the secret design is important, but the manufacturing capability and production engineering is more important. If you just steal an engine you still have a long way to go.
If you were starting a gas turbine program from scratch, you would need a big pile of money (500 million would probably do it), some engineers skilled in thermodynamics, separate engineers skilled in materials, production engineers, etc. You can have GE, Siemens, Alstom, and Rolls Royce's engineers defect to you if you want it bad enough (money and benefits talk loudly in this industry). Then you need to locate a supplier of exotic alloys and large forgings (not as difficult as it sounds), buy some 5 axis CNC machines for airfoils and some larger vertical tables and lathes for the rotors and casings. Get yourself some machinists and millwrights and you're in business. This is out of reach of a small or medium size company, but a Fortune 500 company or medium-size government could do it if they wanted it badly enough.
The cheap domain host I use provides a choice of Atmail Open, Horde, Roundcube, and Squirrelmail. Of those, I always use Atmail Open. Horde and Roundcube don't seem so bad, Atmail is just more my preference. Squirrelmail is archaic and awful.
Care to back any of that up? I was going to mod the whole thing troll but without explaining why it might have seemed I was modding -1, different opinion.
Heat pipes produce little energy and are very expensive to install.
They are expensive, but they are effectively your "fuel" cost. You have to keep drilling wells but that beats mining coal in my opinion.
Limited geothermal sources have led some to consider fracking, which is considered to have caused a quake in France IIRC. They were considering doing the same kind of fracking here near The Geysers in Lake County, CA but they were chased out of town after that.
Using the term "fracking" is inflamatory and not what was proposed or done. Geothermal plants inject water into the ground, not a concoction of nasty chemicals that don't have to be identified.
The facility at The Geysers uses turbines made by Halliburton, which is evil.
This is just wrong. I think I have seen you post this before. Almost all the Geysers turbines were supplied by Toshiba (sorry PDF), with a couple of older ones having been supplied by GE. Toshiba deals directly with Calpine and Haliburton isn't involved at all. I think this is just more inflamatory BS.
The facility at The Geysers has a big concrete pit over which they wash the turbines, because stuff like Arsenic (and other interesting things) comes out of the vent. After the pit fills up with crap they cover it over, raise the wall, and keep going. They're building a highly concentrated layer cake of toxics that one day will probably be broken open by seismic activity, This is an improvement over the former situation of putting slurry in drums and burying them. The drums broke open and we had two-headed cows being born and shit like that. They dug them up and reburied them on top of a plastic liner so that we could have the same problem again in forty years.
It is true that very nasty chemicals come up from the ground, but these are dealt with according to EPA standards. If they weren't, the EPA would fine them info oblivion. This is one of the few points I don't have detailed knowledge of, but I have been at places that were not in EPA compliance and the EPA came down on them hard and fast. Based on the incorrectness of your other points, I would have to assume this is factually suspect at best.
Atop all of this, the facility at The Geysers is perpetually under production targets, and over budget.
I would like to see a source for this. You don't mention if they are profitable or not. And why does that matter anyhow? Calpine is a publicly traded company, they can set whatever internal targets and budgets they like. It doesn't affect anybody except stockholders.
An unregulated currency plagued by theft and controlled by an elite cabal of basement-dwelling enthusiasts who can afford the thousands of dollars worth of hardware to drive smaller players out of the market. I'm sure nothing will go wrong.
In this way, this "technilogical mining rush" follows the follows the development of every other mining rush. A few individuals get rich in the beginning, then other people show up but make very little in comparison. Big outfits show up later and it becomes uneconomical for the little guys to play.
(those door open buttons are hard to find in a hurry sometimes. I believe there's even a paper on it)
In most of the elevators I have used in the US, they don't even work. I am really suspicious that they are even connected to anything and are just there as a placebo. Other countries don't seem to have a problem with this and the door close button closes the door.
5 x energy density of current commercial batteries is not at all in conflict with the laws of physics.
It flies in the face of over 100 years of historical data to have this much battery improvement in 5 years. Battery technology has historically improved by about 5% per year. To get a 5x improvement would take about 34 years barring some earth-shattering discovery the likes of which we have not seen in the past century. The goal of 5x improvement in 5 years seems hopelessly optimistic!
From a chemistry point of view, we are running into a problem too. We are already using the best metal theoretically possible based on chemical reactions and the table of elements (Lithium). We have run out of periodic table. Improvements recently have focused on novel geometries and other tricks.
I believe magnets are the biggest issue or more specifically rare earth magnets. Batteries are great but we'll need efficient motors to go with them and that requires rare earth minerals which are in heavy demand and tightly controlled.
There is no reason you can't use an electromagnet to play the role of "magnet" in a motor or generator. In the large generator world we call this static excitation or brushless excitation depending on the design. Static excitation uses a small permanent magnet generator to flash the field (electromagnet rotor), but brushless excitation systems only employ steel, copper, capacitors, rectifiers, and thyristors to excite the rotor.
I have one of these unpowered antennas. It boosted my signal by about 2 bars (out of 5) on average.
My company has some field engineers who frequently spend time inside construction trailers (usually steel ones like this which are then located inside steel buildings. Their work is never near a metropolitan area and usually in the middle of nowhere with poor cell reception. They use the more expensive antenna+powered amplifier systems and can usually get a usable signal even when I can't.
I have the 49g, the 35s, and the 33s. I used the 49g in college and bought both the 35s and 33s for the Professional Engineering (PE) exam.
The 49g is a fairly nice calculator, but it is so big that I rarely use it. Having multiple lines helps keep track of very lengthy RPN calculations. The 33s I could probably do without- it is obviously build to lower build quality standards than the 35s and is slightly more difficult to use. I only got it as a backup in the unlikely event my 35s died during the PE exam (PE exam is serious business). You can play with the free android app "Droid48" to get a feel for the 49g. The HP 48 series is very similar to the 49 series. It depends on why you are upgrading but I would either stick with what you have or get a 35s.
Yes that birds eye (45 degree) shot does look clearer than Google.
However Google kicks their butt by a big margin (IMHO) for top down view. I have no clue how they have clear 45 degree footage but over sharpened rubbish for top down.
Some of their imagery is from airplanes. It is fairly obvious which are airplanes and which are satellite. They do some stupid and crude "give it some 3d depth!" processing which ruins the clarity of the sat photos. It can be turned off it you play with the settings.
Everybody laughs at Bing, but their aerial maps and photos are sometimes very good. Better than Google in many cases. Here is an example-
google
Bing
That said I only use them for their maps, and only if I need the aerial photo.
$200 doesn't seem too bad for a GPS that integrates with your car electronics completely and seamlessly. No real worries about theft. No stupid suction cup mounts obstructing your visibility. No bean bag mount falling down under high acceleration and cracking the screen (one of my GPS' died this way). No specialty vent mounts breaking bits of plastic in your car. Find another dealer or figure out what part number it is and call their parts department up and order the thing.
Mechanical tools: screwdrivers, wrench kit, pliers, cutters (plier style), cutters (x-acto), hammer, metal file (to round an odd sharp corner), tape measure, heavy-duty duct tape, lots of plastic cable ties. I also needed a drill to install an odd rack shelf, so throw one with some drilling bits if your budget allows. I don't know what cables you use, but tools to fix cabling may come in handy (multimeter, soldering iron and solder, shrinkable tubes, special tool to terminate cables, etc.). If you have fiber optics, get a good push-action connector cleaner.
Did you need to thread that hole too? I bought the cheapest set of chinese taps money can buy thinking they would be used once. I have been surprised at how many times I have used them.
$6000 for a dongle is pretty bad but arguably there is some special sauce or secret things inside the dongle. Any salesperson could concoct a convincing argument justifying it somehow. Until recently, our steam turbine controllers had a $400 backup battery for the memory. It was a 3.6v lithium AA-sized battery with a fancy connector soldered to both terminals and shrink wrapped. It became such a sore point that some more customer-oriented salespeople just pointed the customers to the correct digikey part.
So, if I'm a random security researcher, how do I get my hands on these SCADA systems to test them? They certainly aren't open source, and I'm guessing they aren't cheap. I doubt you can just type a credit card number into GE's web site and download one. How do they get one to look at?
I believe you have just nailed their security through obscurity philosophy. Only organizations with a small pile of cash, the right connections, or existing industry experience are able to play with these toys. This isn't something script kiddies can do.... yet. Sure you can break into a Duke Energy's VPN, and maybe they are stupid enough to still have control software on their internal non-control network. But you probably wouldn't know how to get started with controlling anything unless you had prior industry experience.
If you have prior industry experience, companies are practically falling over themselves to give you a 6 figure paycheck so illegal activities aren't that appealing.