Amazing, if you buy a car that weights 50% more, has more safety features, has more comfort features, faster acceleration and a faster top speed it won't take advantage of all the efficiency gains. Simply amazing.
Well I guess for you it is amazing.
Gas is cheap in the US, if you don't think it is you're an idiot with no perspective, so people won't sacrifice features for fuel efficiency. I know, I'm one of them. Go look in Europe if you want to see cars which give you efficiency instead of more fancy toys.
First of all, sources for those mpg numbers. I'm finding the VW Bug to be listing under 30mpg most anywhere I look. That's not even getting into the fact that how gas mileage is computed was changed a few years ago.
Let's look at the Beetle, roughly 850kg, maybe 60hp and a top speed of 70mph (good luck reaching it before dying of old age).
Take the 2010 VW 2.5 Golf. 30mph highway. Roughly 1350kg, 170hp and top speed of 125mph.
Now Europe is where the real comparisons are. Take the 2010 UK Golf 1.2 TSI. Around 50mph highway (yes, in US gallons). 1250kg, 85hp, top speed 110.
So yes, engines have gotten a shit ton more efficient over the last 35 years. However no one in the US wants to buy a POS 1975s car with a modern engine, safety standards make it impossible actually. They want to buy a modern car with a modern engine. That means more power, more speed, more weight and so on.
How so? It's an obvious solution and one used by a decent number of online backup products. So obvious that pretty much every reply to the original post in this thread mentioned it.
Also, nothing I said requires the data to be encrypted before you send it although that's the most secure way of going about it. It requires the least assumptions of trust in a third party. If you do trust them then your encryption key is simply your password, you send it to your backup provider when you want to access data like you'd do with a password. They don't keep a copy. You have a passworded file with that key in it for convenience but your local system is assumed to be secure so that file's weaker password isn't too big a problem.
It's also possible to do things like public/private keys so they can encrypt your data without your decryption key on their end but only you can decrypt it.
But in the end if you're sending/receiving unencrypted backup data somewhere than someone cracking your password is a hilariously small problem. No one cares. Not worth the time. If they have your data than they can sniff your pass phrase as you access your data. They can silently copy data as you access it. They can do many other things.
Sigh, time to explain basic encryption. Why do people post when they know nothing of the topic and don't even bother researching for 5 minutes?
The long encryption key is stored on your local machine (or on a usb key or a cd or whatever) in a file under a weaker encryption using your password. The only way to get it with the password alone is if you have that file. Otherwise an attacker needs to recreate the whole encryption key from scratch which is sun will die before then time consuming. That file and the encryption key never leaves your local machine. And if the attacker has that file it doesn't matter if your encrypted data is online or note, they have access to your local copy of the data anyway.
What passphrase? You, of course, use a very long random encryption key. That key may have a shorter password on your local machine but no one online has access to that. I figure if someone is willing to run a cracker till the sun burns out they can have my data. Of course even a sufficiently long password is impossible to brute force in any sane amount of time.
No known process allows for information transfer at speeds faster than light. Including quantum entanglement. Stop watching so much science fiction and go read up on what it actually does instead.
So it's more fair for the law to treat you differently based on how much money you earn? Equal Protection should apply to all the laws except the tax code?
Hahahaha. You're seriously claiming most laws don't treat you differently based on how much they make?
Go stick a poor guy and a rich guy on trial with each paying for their own attorney. Guess who comes out ahead? That's not even getting to the ones rich enough to buy politicians to help them get what they want. Look at OJ, with enough money you can get away with murder. On the other hand without money you'll end up on death row because some drunk stoned guy said he saw someone like you near the crime.
I mean, hell, half the reason I care about making decent money is because the law can be bought off. Never know when some prosecutor will need to fill his quota and you happened to be in the wrong place, a neighbor decides to sue you for something, or maybe an ex tries to get revenge.
You can retrofit an old Volkswagen bug to be all electric for less than $7000.
I like to travel in relative comfort and safety.
I don't see what the big push is for the added complexity of a hybrid gasoline/electric engine if you only need one to go more than 60 miles on a trip.
1. Many people do travel more than 60 miles decently often. 2. Many people cannot plug in their cars.
I suppose if you have no idea about what you're talking about than you can make any conclusions you want.
Tuitions don't *have* to go up. Most universities have *INSANE* endowment funds.
No, a very small fraction of universities have good endowments. Those are also generally hard to get into. There are over 4000 colleges and universities in the US, 2500 of those offering 4 years degrees. Over 2 million bachelor and postgraduate students in the US.
I'm all for well funded endowments. But at some point you need to skim a bit off the top. I know it's a slippery slope, and the first uni that starts siphoning funds will be the first one to broke a few years later after the departments go chasing down money like kids picking up candy from a pinata.
Endowments are used to pay for various university costs which means lower tuition than they'd have to pay otherwise. Top universities also as a rule provide very nice financial aid packages nowadays. As in, unless your parents make over $100k a year you won't be paying a dime for some of them. However as I said already there's very few top universities.
PhD programs are usually paid for by the school in exchange for TAing or whatnot at good universities and programs. However there's so few PhD students comparatively it doesn't really matter. Masters aren't paid for as often but those are more professional degrees so employers often pay for them instead.
Even better, of those 57, my wholly uncientific count says that 23 of those school are major football or basketball schools (If you want to call Indiana and Michigan 'major', sigh).
I'd guess most athletics programs are self-sufficient, especially at major universities. If I remember quite a few in fact pay for other school costs.
Which if you really gave a damn about you could trivially look up online on the many websites which cover it. The only thing you listed that isn't absurdly efficient is the first conversion. So in summary, a power plant with an electric car is still a shit ton more efficient than a gasoline engine.
While I certainly agree with the rest of your post, thermal electric plants still aren't very efficient.
Power plants are something like 40-60% efficient nowadays. If they use waste heat for heating the community that can be more or less 100% efficient for part of the year although I don't think that's really done in the US. Gasoline engines are around 25% efficient. Diesel might hit 35% on a good day if I remember. Electric engines themselves are something like 90+% efficient. You still come out ahead.
Emission standards can also be higher on power plants since mass doesn't matter unlike a car.
You're the one whose making a meaningless distinction, it's all incomplete classifications in the end. Some authors prefer "speculative fiction" to "science fiction" because they dislike the later term. You seem to somehow be associating "fantasy" with "low quality" and not wanting whatever you like to be called it.
They call it fantasy because that's what it basically is. The "science" part is missing except as a plot element so divorced with reality it may as well be "magical artifacts" instead. Doesn't make it inherently better or worse but just different. All semantics in the end. You're trying to force your own definition on them as much as they are trying to force it on you.
No, I like quality literature. I couldn't care less about soft sci-fi vs. hard sci-fi, except where one is actually better written than the other.
Quality is subjective and you can judge a work in many different ways. That you cannot apparently comprehend this means there's no point in me trying to explain it to you since you're either too ignorant or self-centered. Likewise, that you cannot understand why authors write certain books in a certain way shows your ignorance of writing.
So you don't like anything but soft science fiction? Your point being? No, seriously, you come off as hilariously defensive. It's as if having a smaller e-penis on slashdot somehow angers and annoys you greatly.
The problem with asserting CO2 is a "lever" for H2O is that you've missed out on clouds entirely.
You're fallen into the very trap you're complaining about. The effects of cloud cover are unknown. High altitude clouds are in fact a positive feedback (transparent to sunlight but not earth radiated IR). Low altitude clouds are a negative feedback. On the other hand rising temperatures may change the balance between the two even from the current one. Then it gets even more complicated.
The negative feedback loops that exist in our system (and they must, otherwise we'd have already had either run away cooling or run away warming) turn those levers into negligible influences.
Does the term "ice age" mean nothing to you? Seriously? The world has had run away cooling and heating in the past, possibly even got near totally frozen at one point. At some point the negative feedback does win out but that still gives you a 10000 year long ice age. It just stabilizes and then ends at some point.
Why do you think petrol in Malaysia is still so cheap, because Petronas runs the government.
What the hell are you smoking? First of all, the current price is roughly in line with other nations. Second of all, the government used to massively subsidize the cost of gasoline which is why it was so inexpensive. They paid the same to the oil companies as everyone else and covered the difference with taxes.
The well was a write off from the moment the thing started leaking. Everyone knew that. I mean seriously, they can barely cap the thing, how in god's name do you expect them to repair all the damage that was done to it?
It's orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to just drill another well, they're not some magical things that suddenly shows up in the middle of the ocean, we can make more of them.
I generally assume the Chinese government expects to become a democracy of some sort in the long run. Long being the operative term. Short term they want to avoid ending up like Russia after the Soviet Union fell. Or Africa and India after the colonial powers left. Hell, China itself under Mao is a perfect example of what atrocities can happen when random "revolutionaries" gain power. In other words a slow controlled shift rather than an abrupt one that implodes the economy.
Remember that it took the west centuries and a millennial old traditions (ie: Greece, Rome, etc.) to move towards democracy and freedom. Centuries filled with some quite bloody and unsuccessful attempts such as the French Revolution. Culture and society adapt slowly, especially in rural poor area, and assuming otherwise lead to horrid things (see Africa).
No, good universities select people who already know how to learn. Or who are so bloody intelligent they look like they knew how to learn. Or who their acceptance process failed to weed out.
Completing a degree demonstrates your ability to complete a long-term project presumably with all the initiative, time-management and general project planning that entails.
In other words, the degree is useless by your own admission. It indicates a candidate probably possesses some skill but does not actually develop it any more than working for four years would.
Sort of akin to only hiring white people because they're less likely to come from poor uneducated backgrounds. Actually interview them to see if they have the required skills? too much effort.
That you cannot comprehend simple argument without having all the assumptions explained is not my fucking problem. I don't really give a damn what you want, you're a random asshole on slashdot. No, you don't matter. Deal with it.
If you want to use nitpicking to deflect from your own inability to counter my points go right ahead but no one is falling for it.
Please explain what you mean. Your premise and conclusion are not related, which makes your statement completely nonsensical.
Sure it makes sense. Batteries 30% as energy dense as gasoline will move your car further than the same mass of gasoline. In other words energy density alone is a silly measure, granted even with that the difference is something like 15 times.
And if that were the issue, we wouldn't even be discussing it. I can already get electric cars that are completely useful and practical for short trips around town, so that the car spends most of its time at home charging. The problem is that none of them are any good at all for leaving town, since there's no available means to recharge them easily, quickly, or without special arrangements.
Few people leave town, not that far out anyway. 160 miles is not a short hop around town.
Citation, please. Adding generation losses, transmission losses, DC conversion losses, battery storage losses, and drivetrain losses to compare it to the total efficiency of an internal combustion engine is a nontrivial thing. Just because some dude on Slashdot assures me that "someone did look into it" does not at all make me satisfied that reality is in any way supportive of the claim.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazing, if you buy a car that weights 50% more, has more safety features, has more comfort features, faster acceleration and a faster top speed it won't take advantage of all the efficiency gains. Simply amazing.
Well I guess for you it is amazing.
Gas is cheap in the US, if you don't think it is you're an idiot with no perspective, so people won't sacrifice features for fuel efficiency. I know, I'm one of them. Go look in Europe if you want to see cars which give you efficiency instead of more fancy toys.
First of all, sources for those mpg numbers. I'm finding the VW Bug to be listing under 30mpg most anywhere I look. That's not even getting into the fact that how gas mileage is computed was changed a few years ago.
Let's look at the Beetle, roughly 850kg, maybe 60hp and a top speed of 70mph (good luck reaching it before dying of old age).
Take the 2010 VW 2.5 Golf. 30mph highway. Roughly 1350kg, 170hp and top speed of 125mph.
Now Europe is where the real comparisons are. Take the 2010 UK Golf 1.2 TSI. Around 50mph highway (yes, in US gallons). 1250kg, 85hp, top speed 110.
So yes, engines have gotten a shit ton more efficient over the last 35 years. However no one in the US wants to buy a POS 1975s car with a modern engine, safety standards make it impossible actually. They want to buy a modern car with a modern engine. That means more power, more speed, more weight and so on.
How so? It's an obvious solution and one used by a decent number of online backup products. So obvious that pretty much every reply to the original post in this thread mentioned it.
Also, nothing I said requires the data to be encrypted before you send it although that's the most secure way of going about it. It requires the least assumptions of trust in a third party. If you do trust them then your encryption key is simply your password, you send it to your backup provider when you want to access data like you'd do with a password. They don't keep a copy. You have a passworded file with that key in it for convenience but your local system is assumed to be secure so that file's weaker password isn't too big a problem.
It's also possible to do things like public/private keys so they can encrypt your data without your decryption key on their end but only you can decrypt it.
But in the end if you're sending/receiving unencrypted backup data somewhere than someone cracking your password is a hilariously small problem. No one cares. Not worth the time. If they have your data than they can sniff your pass phrase as you access your data. They can silently copy data as you access it. They can do many other things.
Sigh, time to explain basic encryption. Why do people post when they know nothing of the topic and don't even bother researching for 5 minutes?
The long encryption key is stored on your local machine (or on a usb key or a cd or whatever) in a file under a weaker encryption using your password. The only way to get it with the password alone is if you have that file. Otherwise an attacker needs to recreate the whole encryption key from scratch which is sun will die before then time consuming. That file and the encryption key never leaves your local machine. And if the attacker has that file it doesn't matter if your encrypted data is online or note, they have access to your local copy of the data anyway.
What passphrase? You, of course, use a very long random encryption key. That key may have a shorter password on your local machine but no one online has access to that. I figure if someone is willing to run a cracker till the sun burns out they can have my data. Of course even a sufficiently long password is impossible to brute force in any sane amount of time.
No known process allows for information transfer at speeds faster than light. Including quantum entanglement. Stop watching so much science fiction and go read up on what it actually does instead.
And nerve cells don't use DNA for storing information, so your point is what again?
So it's more fair for the law to treat you differently based on how much money you earn? Equal Protection should apply to all the laws except the tax code?
Hahahaha. You're seriously claiming most laws don't treat you differently based on how much they make?
Go stick a poor guy and a rich guy on trial with each paying for their own attorney. Guess who comes out ahead? That's not even getting to the ones rich enough to buy politicians to help them get what they want. Look at OJ, with enough money you can get away with murder. On the other hand without money you'll end up on death row because some drunk stoned guy said he saw someone like you near the crime.
I mean, hell, half the reason I care about making decent money is because the law can be bought off. Never know when some prosecutor will need to fill his quota and you happened to be in the wrong place, a neighbor decides to sue you for something, or maybe an ex tries to get revenge.
You can retrofit an old Volkswagen bug to be all electric for less than $7000.
I like to travel in relative comfort and safety.
I don't see what the big push is for the added complexity of a hybrid gasoline/electric engine if you only need one to go more than 60 miles on a trip.
1. Many people do travel more than 60 miles decently often.
2. Many people cannot plug in their cars.
It's 1.14% not 11.4%.
I suppose if you have no idea about what you're talking about than you can make any conclusions you want.
Tuitions don't *have* to go up. Most universities have *INSANE* endowment funds.
No, a very small fraction of universities have good endowments. Those are also generally hard to get into. There are over 4000 colleges and universities in the US, 2500 of those offering 4 years degrees. Over 2 million bachelor and postgraduate students in the US.
I'm all for well funded endowments. But at some point you need to skim a bit off the top. I know it's a slippery slope, and the first uni that starts siphoning funds will be the first one to broke a few years later after the departments go chasing down money like kids picking up candy from a pinata.
Endowments are used to pay for various university costs which means lower tuition than they'd have to pay otherwise. Top universities also as a rule provide very nice financial aid packages nowadays. As in, unless your parents make over $100k a year you won't be paying a dime for some of them. However as I said already there's very few top universities.
PhD programs are usually paid for by the school in exchange for TAing or whatnot at good universities and programs. However there's so few PhD students comparatively it doesn't really matter. Masters aren't paid for as often but those are more professional degrees so employers often pay for them instead.
Even better, of those 57, my wholly uncientific count says that 23 of those school are major football or basketball schools (If you want to call Indiana and Michigan 'major', sigh).
I'd guess most athletics programs are self-sufficient, especially at major universities. If I remember quite a few in fact pay for other school costs.
Which if you really gave a damn about you could trivially look up online on the many websites which cover it. The only thing you listed that isn't absurdly efficient is the first conversion. So in summary, a power plant with an electric car is still a shit ton more efficient than a gasoline engine.
While I certainly agree with the rest of your post, thermal electric plants still aren't very efficient.
Power plants are something like 40-60% efficient nowadays. If they use waste heat for heating the community that can be more or less 100% efficient for part of the year although I don't think that's really done in the US. Gasoline engines are around 25% efficient. Diesel might hit 35% on a good day if I remember. Electric engines themselves are something like 90+% efficient. You still come out ahead.
Emission standards can also be higher on power plants since mass doesn't matter unlike a car.
Just run parallel wires instead of serializing everything and you have all the throughput anyone could possibly use.
Why would you want the link to be slower? Hint: There's a reason everything is serial now rather than parallel.
You're the one whose making a meaningless distinction, it's all incomplete classifications in the end. Some authors prefer "speculative fiction" to "science fiction" because they dislike the later term. You seem to somehow be associating "fantasy" with "low quality" and not wanting whatever you like to be called it.
They call it fantasy because that's what it basically is. The "science" part is missing except as a plot element so divorced with reality it may as well be "magical artifacts" instead. Doesn't make it inherently better or worse but just different. All semantics in the end. You're trying to force your own definition on them as much as they are trying to force it on you.
No, I like quality literature. I couldn't care less about soft sci-fi vs. hard sci-fi, except where one is actually better written than the other.
Quality is subjective and you can judge a work in many different ways. That you cannot apparently comprehend this means there's no point in me trying to explain it to you since you're either too ignorant or self-centered. Likewise, that you cannot understand why authors write certain books in a certain way shows your ignorance of writing.
So you don't like anything but soft science fiction? Your point being? No, seriously, you come off as hilariously defensive. It's as if having a smaller e-penis on slashdot somehow angers and annoys you greatly.
The problem with asserting CO2 is a "lever" for H2O is that you've missed out on clouds entirely.
You're fallen into the very trap you're complaining about. The effects of cloud cover are unknown. High altitude clouds are in fact a positive feedback (transparent to sunlight but not earth radiated IR). Low altitude clouds are a negative feedback. On the other hand rising temperatures may change the balance between the two even from the current one. Then it gets even more complicated.
The negative feedback loops that exist in our system (and they must, otherwise we'd have already had either run away cooling or run away warming) turn those levers into negligible influences.
Does the term "ice age" mean nothing to you? Seriously? The world has had run away cooling and heating in the past, possibly even got near totally frozen at one point. At some point the negative feedback does win out but that still gives you a 10000 year long ice age. It just stabilizes and then ends at some point.
So OPEC doesn't exist?
Why do you think petrol in Malaysia is still so cheap, because Petronas runs the government.
What the hell are you smoking? First of all, the current price is roughly in line with other nations. Second of all, the government used to massively subsidize the cost of gasoline which is why it was so inexpensive. They paid the same to the oil companies as everyone else and covered the difference with taxes.
The well was a write off from the moment the thing started leaking. Everyone knew that. I mean seriously, they can barely cap the thing, how in god's name do you expect them to repair all the damage that was done to it?
It's orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to just drill another well, they're not some magical things that suddenly shows up in the middle of the ocean, we can make more of them.
I generally assume the Chinese government expects to become a democracy of some sort in the long run. Long being the operative term. Short term they want to avoid ending up like Russia after the Soviet Union fell. Or Africa and India after the colonial powers left. Hell, China itself under Mao is a perfect example of what atrocities can happen when random "revolutionaries" gain power. In other words a slow controlled shift rather than an abrupt one that implodes the economy.
Remember that it took the west centuries and a millennial old traditions (ie: Greece, Rome, etc.) to move towards democracy and freedom. Centuries filled with some quite bloody and unsuccessful attempts such as the French Revolution. Culture and society adapt slowly, especially in rural poor area, and assuming otherwise lead to horrid things (see Africa).
No, good universities select people who already know how to learn. Or who are so bloody intelligent they look like they knew how to learn. Or who their acceptance process failed to weed out.
There is a difference.
Completing a degree demonstrates your ability to complete a long-term project presumably with all the initiative, time-management and general project planning that entails.
In other words, the degree is useless by your own admission. It indicates a candidate probably possesses some skill but does not actually develop it any more than working for four years would.
Sort of akin to only hiring white people because they're less likely to come from poor uneducated backgrounds. Actually interview them to see if they have the required skills? too much effort.
That you cannot comprehend simple argument without having all the assumptions explained is not my fucking problem. I don't really give a damn what you want, you're a random asshole on slashdot. No, you don't matter. Deal with it.
If you want to use nitpicking to deflect from your own inability to counter my points go right ahead but no one is falling for it.
Please explain what you mean. Your premise and conclusion are not related, which makes your statement completely nonsensical.
Sure it makes sense. Batteries 30% as energy dense as gasoline will move your car further than the same mass of gasoline. In other words energy density alone is a silly measure, granted even with that the difference is something like 15 times.
And if that were the issue, we wouldn't even be discussing it. I can already get electric cars that are completely useful and practical for short trips around town, so that the car spends most of its time at home charging. The problem is that none of them are any good at all for leaving town, since there's no available means to recharge them easily, quickly, or without special arrangements.
Few people leave town, not that far out anyway. 160 miles is not a short hop around town.
Citation, please. Adding generation losses, transmission losses, DC conversion losses, battery storage losses, and drivetrain losses to compare it to the total efficiency of an internal combustion engine is a nontrivial thing. Just because some dude on Slashdot assures me that "someone did look into it" does not at all make me satisfied that reality is in any way supportive of the claim.
And building a skyscraper isn't trivial either, amazingly we manage to do it all the time. It's trivial to look these things up and the numbers are well published, for chutulu's sake even wikipedia goes over it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car
http://cartalk.com/blogs/jim-motavalli/?p=208