ICs really aren't that expensive to maintain. Batteries in electric cars.. they, uh, last I checked were quite a lot. Basically it worked out near enough that by the time the batteries need replacing, the cost would be about equal to the value of the vehicle.
And they degrade in function over time. ICs don't do that -- at least, not perceptibly. You don't get 80% of the car's original range out of it after 4 years with an IC engined vehicle, but that'll happen with a battery system.
Hybrids are kinda cool, but the energy requirements of a car vary pretty widely.. it's not like a train. Still, a nice little diesel you'd think should be able to run a little generator at a constant output pretty efficiently. 'course there's environmental regulations that make diesels less desirable here in the states than in europe..
long story short, gasoline / diesel / other shit what burns and blows up like that from a liquid form is still, by far, the most conveniently transportable form of energy we've got. It's relatively stable, it's got a high energy density, it's fairly easy to transport and store and deliver, and, well.. if you tried to deliver enough charge to a battery to provide an electric car with 350 miles of range in the time it takes to pump that much gas, i can only imagine the whole thing would melt and explode spectacularly..
[quote]Also, you don't drive enough on a day to day basis to warrant the argument you present. And 'with such limited uses' is really a bold exaggeration; an electric car would actually suffice for every single function your current car does except for long range travel.[/quote]
My daily commute is 70 miles.
Half of which is 65+mph highway, the other half ~35mph country roads.
I like the way you presume things about my life and what my needs are without any idea whatsoever what that might actually be.
And, as I said -- if someone is mindful of spending money and can only afford one vehicle, but DOES drive extended distances to say a parent's or grandparent's on the weekend once or twice a month, that person would be very disinclined to buy a car that would not allow them to do so. They would be financially disinclined to buy a vehicle to fulfill that need AND another, electric, vehicle to handle other transportation needs.
I mean, that is a huge expenditure for a typical person.
Yes, the batteries can be recycled into new batteries.. but the rub is that takes a large investment of energy to accomplish. More than it takes to make new parts for cars. Most of the parts you'd be replacing in an IC engine are going to be steel.. that's a material that really doesn't take much energy to turn into a finished product. A fancy schmancy battery? Little bit more costly.
I never said electric motors are hard to maintain. I said their power supply -- if it's batteries -- are more expensive than an IC engine would be to maintain. I actually said the motors are fine. Very resilient. I've worked with some quite large ones. But the batteries? They kinda suck. Batteries degrade in function, and degrade over time. An engine will work, and you'll get near the same mpg out of it, for a long, long time. Batteries will over time hold and discharge less and less power. That's what they do, that's why your cell phone only needed charged every 4 days when it was new and now you plug it in every night.
But go ahead. Tell me I only need to travel 50 miles round trip without taking an 8 to 12 hour time-out at my home some more. Tell me that the battery life is rated 8 to 10 years about 5 years down the line when it's degraded and i'm only getting 2/3 the original range from the vehicle, and it's a few grand to replace.
For reference I checked the Tesla roadster, and it looks like they're rated to be at 70% performance after 5 years. And a bit under $36k to replace.. that's USD.
But that's ok, you keep on keepin' on and spouting a bunch of crap that in no way reflects reality.
Electrical engines degrade in function MUCH, MUCH faster than IC engines -- when you're talking about vehicles -- because the batteries, no matter how advanced, still degrade. The motors themselves are fine, but it's the batteries that are the weak point.
They need to be replaced, frequently, are expensive both monetarily and looking at energy-to-produce. compared to just hunks of metal and plastic for an IC engine? Very pricey..
now into that "aw, really?" equation, throw in that the batteries are much slower to recharge than a gas tank is to fill up -- I can fill my tank up once a week, I get ~350 miles out of that. 5 minutes per week.
Rechargeable batteries in a car? It'd take hours to get that much charge, and even then I'm still restricted to a certain, VERY LOW range between recharges. It's not even that it takes 1 day to charge for a week of use.. it's more frequent than that. Electric car is not feasible for anyone who would want to travel 100 miles in one direction. Ever. Unless it's a second vehicle, but let's be honest. There are NOT that many people looking for a second vehicle with such limited uses. Not right now especially.
hydrocarbon fuels are an *extremely* convenient way to transport energy, and IC engines have a significantly lower lifetime maintenance cost than a hybrid / pure electric vehicle.
To be an effective trader, basically what you do is step in to a transaction between two people and shove them far enough apart that they can't communicate. Then you go to the seller, tell them that you and your buddies are their only market and you will pay them $XYZ for everything they have. A real low-ball figure. Do your best to put them in the fucking poor house.
You then take whatever you bought to the person who was already interested in buying it, and tell them you and your buddies are the only source for whatever it is you bought, and if they want any of it they'll have to pay you $XXYYZZ. An absurdly overvalued figure. Do your best to put them in the fucking poor house.
What's going on is that traders at no point are about facilitating exchanges between two parties. Every step of the way, their goal is to screw everybody who's still holding a single red cent so hard that their fillings fall out, and then collect those fillings -- gold, too, is an investment.
Yes, because that's the first time anyone has used an X to mark a spot, or said they are "targeting" a district. Clearly she means to communicate to her followers that she intends to shoot democrats from a helicopter. Clearly that is the truth, and you are not an insane fucking moonbat with an ax to grind.
BRB, SUING LAW ENFORCEMENT FOR THREATENING TO SHOOT ME WITH THOSE "TARGETING YOUR AREA" ANTI-DRUNK-DRIVING COMMERCIALS!!!
well.... not really. I read the patent and every step of the way seemed to be involved with a tournament that featured an entry fee, so there's that easy escape card.
Also at any point in the patent if you replace "controller" with "a person" -- that is, if you have people looking at paper instead having a computer and database automatically checking things out -- well, there's a ton of prior art for that, and that's just flat-out not patentable. I mean.. it IS.. but it shouldn't be, because it's obvious, and because it's not innovative in any way -- all that's happening is a database is doing the lookups and verification and tourny advancement tracking. that's not innovative. step 1 is having a person using a database instead of paper, step 2 is removing that person and having the database do its own thing, this should not be patentable.
pretty sure refusing to work the job the government told you to work in communist russia resulted in a bullet to the brain.
it is, very honestly, the ONLY manner in which a widespread communistic system can operate -- else many, many people would simply not work. once a critical number of not-working-people is reached, their basic needs outweigh the wealth generated by the still-working, and the system collapses.
graphics card makers have been doing this for many many years.
so you get a new card design. the biggest cost is going to be setting up production for it. once everything's all tooled up and ready to go, your biggest expense is out of the way.
then you get a better design. you tool up for it, but you still want to sell the older design at a lower cost -- not everyone wants to drop bank for top of the line. except, dang. you're not making those cards any more. well, rather than go through the expense of re-tooling everything and doing limited runs of an inferior product... it's a much better decision to just take what you are producing and cripple a certain number to meet the specs for the old card and sell them. Sure, profit margins might be more slim than had you stuck with the original tooling, but it's important for your production to be of the most advanced card possible -- so you won't need to redesign and retool everything for the longest time possible.
basically, it's probably quite a bit cheaper for them to sell a higher-tier card for a lower price with some features disabled than it would be for them to take production offline and retool for an already-obsolete design
An image of Steve Jobs hovering precariously atop the production line, straddling the birth tube of his empire, a smile on his face as he hunkers down and lets the conveyor belt drag each and every item ever so gently under his balls for the Reality-Distortion-Teabag.
If my housing and food were guaranteed to be paid for, for the rest of my life, I'd never bother doing a damned thing past that. I'd have endless hobbies and diversions and time-wasters, but I'd not get a job. I know this about myself. I also know I am not alone.
If you look at societies where people are handed all they need to survive without ever having to do anything on their own.. that's about as far as they make it. Sure, some will work hard for really no reason, but many will just choose to exist. And fill the time with drugs, and with sex, and other "vices". This is human nature. We are selfish and exploitative.
As a lazy fucking layabout I assure you there are many more of me, and a guaranteed basic income reads as nothing more than me never having to work a day in my life, for anything, ever.
Many, many millions of others will look at it precisely the same way.
Fuck the collective good, I'll get mine.
This is a fact. This is reality. This is why communism never works and socialism always slowly fails. There must be a way to purge the system from those who will suck all they can from society but never add one bit of their own work. That is nature. In a small group you can kick members out -- kibbutz communes and such. On a larger scale, you wind up with the Russian solution -- that is, you kill people.
You like the original Star Wars movies, right? FX did not ruin them. Right. Now jump forward in time. Lucas has thrown dewbacks and new aliens and fucking Greedo shoots first. The movies are much shittier now than they used to be. all thanks to FX (and George Lucas's never-ending desire to shit on my childhood and make bank while doing so)
I find your premise that conservatives don't care about civil liberties or human rights -- that only liberals care about such things -- laughably pathetic and ill-informed.
There's plenty of people who can shoot near-MOA groups at 100 yards with a revolver. That's 300 feet. That's "hundreds of feet" in other words. There's plenty of people who can shoot more accurately at 100 yards with a handgun than an AK-47 is capable of shooting at 100 yards (of course, with deference to very accurate AKs -- some of them have been worked on and can shoot fairly well, but even the 'accurized' sniper-variant AKs that you can find being used to snipe US troops abroad tend more towards a 2" group at 100 yards).
If the hatred, anger and vitriol found in today's leftist rally/riots can be taken as an example of what that crowd was like, I think it's more than just a little likely that's what happened.
I don't see how everyone's up in arms about him being an "informant". It doesn't seem anyone had any confusion as to who he was working for -- and he had every right to be there taking pictures and recording things, just as much as any of the protesters had the same right, or any other sort of reporter. But hey, that's how it goes -- it's OK to film incidents of "The Man" acting wrongly (and, it IS), but if you're filming incidents of "The People" acting wrongly they suddenly forget themselves and act not as they should with equal respect to everyone's rights but instead only in their own self-interest.
They only listened to their customers because their customers were doing their best to ruin the life of one of their employees, or possibly some other guy with the same name -- and showed every intention of doing the same over and over just to prove that RealID on forums was a terrible idea.
The thing is that none of the important things the RealID friend system does couldn't be done better by simply NOT USING PEOPLE'S REAL FUCKING NAMES.
That's the issue. It's really not a bad system, if it just DIDN'T USE PEOPLE'S REAL FUCKING NAMES.
There's also the unsavory fact that releasing RealID to their forums with intentions of it reducing trolling reveals that Blizz believes people should be afraid of RL consequences for forum posts while at the same time telling people they're completely safe and nobody would hunt them down (either in person or simply via the electronic trail) and cause RL consequences for the things they post. The entire premise they based releasing RealID on the forums was that tying your name to your posts would cause you to behave due to the fear of people identifying that post as coming from you, specifically, the real person -- while at the same time telling everyone that it's still pretty anonymous and safe, stop worrying so much. Idiots twice over.
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ICs really aren't that expensive to maintain. Batteries in electric cars.. they, uh, last I checked were quite a lot. Basically it worked out near enough that by the time the batteries need replacing, the cost would be about equal to the value of the vehicle.
And they degrade in function over time. ICs don't do that -- at least, not perceptibly. You don't get 80% of the car's original range out of it after 4 years with an IC engined vehicle, but that'll happen with a battery system.
Hybrids are kinda cool, but the energy requirements of a car vary pretty widely.. it's not like a train. Still, a nice little diesel you'd think should be able to run a little generator at a constant output pretty efficiently. 'course there's environmental regulations that make diesels less desirable here in the states than in europe..
long story short, gasoline / diesel / other shit what burns and blows up like that from a liquid form is still, by far, the most conveniently transportable form of energy we've got. It's relatively stable, it's got a high energy density, it's fairly easy to transport and store and deliver, and, well.. if you tried to deliver enough charge to a battery to provide an electric car with 350 miles of range in the time it takes to pump that much gas, i can only imagine the whole thing would melt and explode spectacularly..
[quote]Also, you don't drive enough on a day to day basis to warrant the argument you present. And 'with such limited uses' is really a bold exaggeration; an electric car would actually suffice for every single function your current car does except for long range travel.[/quote]
My daily commute is 70 miles.
Half of which is 65+mph highway, the other half ~35mph country roads.
I like the way you presume things about my life and what my needs are without any idea whatsoever what that might actually be.
And, as I said -- if someone is mindful of spending money and can only afford one vehicle, but DOES drive extended distances to say a parent's or grandparent's on the weekend once or twice a month, that person would be very disinclined to buy a car that would not allow them to do so. They would be financially disinclined to buy a vehicle to fulfill that need AND another, electric, vehicle to handle other transportation needs.
I mean, that is a huge expenditure for a typical person.
Yes, the batteries can be recycled into new batteries.. but the rub is that takes a large investment of energy to accomplish. More than it takes to make new parts for cars. Most of the parts you'd be replacing in an IC engine are going to be steel.. that's a material that really doesn't take much energy to turn into a finished product. A fancy schmancy battery? Little bit more costly.
I never said electric motors are hard to maintain. I said their power supply -- if it's batteries -- are more expensive than an IC engine would be to maintain. I actually said the motors are fine. Very resilient. I've worked with some quite large ones. But the batteries? They kinda suck. Batteries degrade in function, and degrade over time. An engine will work, and you'll get near the same mpg out of it, for a long, long time. Batteries will over time hold and discharge less and less power. That's what they do, that's why your cell phone only needed charged every 4 days when it was new and now you plug it in every night.
But go ahead. Tell me I only need to travel 50 miles round trip without taking an 8 to 12 hour time-out at my home some more. Tell me that the battery life is rated 8 to 10 years about 5 years down the line when it's degraded and i'm only getting 2/3 the original range from the vehicle, and it's a few grand to replace.
For reference I checked the Tesla roadster, and it looks like they're rated to be at 70% performance after 5 years. And a bit under $36k to replace.. that's USD.
But that's ok, you keep on keepin' on and spouting a bunch of crap that in no way reflects reality.
There's no reason to believe that -- but if you actually believe that, then let market forces drive it.
Not mandates, laws and regulations.
Electrical engines degrade in function MUCH, MUCH faster than IC engines -- when you're talking about vehicles -- because the batteries, no matter how advanced, still degrade. The motors themselves are fine, but it's the batteries that are the weak point.
They need to be replaced, frequently, are expensive both monetarily and looking at energy-to-produce. compared to just hunks of metal and plastic for an IC engine? Very pricey..
now into that "aw, really?" equation, throw in that the batteries are much slower to recharge than a gas tank is to fill up -- I can fill my tank up once a week, I get ~350 miles out of that. 5 minutes per week.
Rechargeable batteries in a car? It'd take hours to get that much charge, and even then I'm still restricted to a certain, VERY LOW range between recharges. It's not even that it takes 1 day to charge for a week of use.. it's more frequent than that. Electric car is not feasible for anyone who would want to travel 100 miles in one direction. Ever. Unless it's a second vehicle, but let's be honest. There are NOT that many people looking for a second vehicle with such limited uses. Not right now especially.
hydrocarbon fuels are an *extremely* convenient way to transport energy, and IC engines have a significantly lower lifetime maintenance cost than a hybrid / pure electric vehicle.
To be an effective trader, basically what you do is step in to a transaction between two people and shove them far enough apart that they can't communicate. Then you go to the seller, tell them that you and your buddies are their only market and you will pay them $XYZ for everything they have. A real low-ball figure. Do your best to put them in the fucking poor house.
You then take whatever you bought to the person who was already interested in buying it, and tell them you and your buddies are the only source for whatever it is you bought, and if they want any of it they'll have to pay you $XXYYZZ. An absurdly overvalued figure. Do your best to put them in the fucking poor house.
What's going on is that traders at no point are about facilitating exchanges between two parties. Every step of the way, their goal is to screw everybody who's still holding a single red cent so hard that their fillings fall out, and then collect those fillings -- gold, too, is an investment.
Yes, because that's the first time anyone has used an X to mark a spot, or said they are "targeting" a district. Clearly she means to communicate to her followers that she intends to shoot democrats from a helicopter. Clearly that is the truth, and you are not an insane fucking moonbat with an ax to grind.
BRB, SUING LAW ENFORCEMENT FOR THREATENING TO SHOOT ME WITH THOSE "TARGETING YOUR AREA" ANTI-DRUNK-DRIVING COMMERCIALS!!!
well.... not really. I read the patent and every step of the way seemed to be involved with a tournament that featured an entry fee, so there's that easy escape card.
Also at any point in the patent if you replace "controller" with "a person" -- that is, if you have people looking at paper instead having a computer and database automatically checking things out -- well, there's a ton of prior art for that, and that's just flat-out not patentable. I mean.. it IS.. but it shouldn't be, because it's obvious, and because it's not innovative in any way -- all that's happening is a database is doing the lookups and verification and tourny advancement tracking. that's not innovative. step 1 is having a person using a database instead of paper, step 2 is removing that person and having the database do its own thing, this should not be patentable.
pretty sure refusing to work the job the government told you to work in communist russia resulted in a bullet to the brain.
it is, very honestly, the ONLY manner in which a widespread communistic system can operate -- else many, many people would simply not work. once a critical number of not-working-people is reached, their basic needs outweigh the wealth generated by the still-working, and the system collapses.
If you handed most Americans 1/4 of their pre-tax wages, you would not be handing them an amount of money sufficient for survival.
nah you're looking at it wrong.
graphics card makers have been doing this for many many years.
so you get a new card design. the biggest cost is going to be setting up production for it. once everything's all tooled up and ready to go, your biggest expense is out of the way.
then you get a better design. you tool up for it, but you still want to sell the older design at a lower cost -- not everyone wants to drop bank for top of the line. except, dang. you're not making those cards any more. well, rather than go through the expense of re-tooling everything and doing limited runs of an inferior product... it's a much better decision to just take what you are producing and cripple a certain number to meet the specs for the old card and sell them. Sure, profit margins might be more slim than had you stuck with the original tooling, but it's important for your production to be of the most advanced card possible -- so you won't need to redesign and retool everything for the longest time possible.
basically, it's probably quite a bit cheaper for them to sell a higher-tier card for a lower price with some features disabled than it would be for them to take production offline and retool for an already-obsolete design
An image of Steve Jobs hovering precariously atop the production line, straddling the birth tube of his empire, a smile on his face as he hunkers down and lets the conveyor belt drag each and every item ever so gently under his balls for the Reality-Distortion-Teabag.
Ok? Good for you? That's a hobby?
I can't tell this to you more clearly.
If my housing and food were guaranteed to be paid for, for the rest of my life, I'd never bother doing a damned thing past that. I'd have endless hobbies and diversions and time-wasters, but I'd not get a job. I know this about myself. I also know I am not alone.
If you look at societies where people are handed all they need to survive without ever having to do anything on their own.. that's about as far as they make it. Sure, some will work hard for really no reason, but many will just choose to exist. And fill the time with drugs, and with sex, and other "vices". This is human nature. We are selfish and exploitative.
As a lazy fucking layabout I assure you there are many more of me, and a guaranteed basic income reads as nothing more than me never having to work a day in my life, for anything, ever.
Many, many millions of others will look at it precisely the same way.
Fuck the collective good, I'll get mine.
This is a fact. This is reality. This is why communism never works and socialism always slowly fails. There must be a way to purge the system from those who will suck all they can from society but never add one bit of their own work. That is nature. In a small group you can kick members out -- kibbutz communes and such. On a larger scale, you wind up with the Russian solution -- that is, you kill people.
FX does ruin movies.
You like the original Star Wars movies, right? FX did not ruin them. Right.
Now jump forward in time. Lucas has thrown dewbacks and new aliens and fucking Greedo shoots first. The movies are much shittier now than they used to be. all thanks to FX (and George Lucas's never-ending desire to shit on my childhood and make bank while doing so)
No, everyone else is still running. Don't make that mistake.
They're just so far behind us that we look alone up in the front.
Agree on how it's to be shared? Huh? There's an easy way to do that, you sell it. Or do you have a problem with the open market?
This has been an interesting topic in sci-fi, I recall an X-Files that revolved around silicon based life.
More importantly, there was a ST:TOS episode involving a silicon-based life form. Which was AWESOME.
I find your premise that conservatives don't care about civil liberties or human rights -- that only liberals care about such things -- laughably pathetic and ill-informed.
There's plenty of people who can shoot near-MOA groups at 100 yards with a revolver. That's 300 feet. That's "hundreds of feet" in other words. There's plenty of people who can shoot more accurately at 100 yards with a handgun than an AK-47 is capable of shooting at 100 yards (of course, with deference to very accurate AKs -- some of them have been worked on and can shoot fairly well, but even the 'accurized' sniper-variant AKs that you can find being used to snipe US troops abroad tend more towards a 2" group at 100 yards).
If the hatred, anger and vitriol found in today's leftist rally/riots can be taken as an example of what that crowd was like, I think it's more than just a little likely that's what happened.
I don't see how everyone's up in arms about him being an "informant". It doesn't seem anyone had any confusion as to who he was working for -- and he had every right to be there taking pictures and recording things, just as much as any of the protesters had the same right, or any other sort of reporter. But hey, that's how it goes -- it's OK to film incidents of "The Man" acting wrongly (and, it IS), but if you're filming incidents of "The People" acting wrongly they suddenly forget themselves and act not as they should with equal respect to everyone's rights but instead only in their own self-interest.
and integrate with various geographically disparate locations
Are you forgetting that Robby Van Winkle also ventured into movies? Not just bit parts, either! Haven't you ever seen Cool As Ice?
Why would they? Nobody threw a fit when the Clinton administration disappeared scores of documents, why should anything change?
They only listened to their customers because their customers were doing their best to ruin the life of one of their employees, or possibly some other guy with the same name -- and showed every intention of doing the same over and over just to prove that RealID on forums was a terrible idea.
The thing is that none of the important things the RealID friend system does couldn't be done better by simply NOT USING PEOPLE'S REAL FUCKING NAMES.
That's the issue. It's really not a bad system, if it just DIDN'T USE PEOPLE'S REAL FUCKING NAMES.
There's also the unsavory fact that releasing RealID to their forums with intentions of it reducing trolling reveals that Blizz believes people should be afraid of RL consequences for forum posts while at the same time telling people they're completely safe and nobody would hunt them down (either in person or simply via the electronic trail) and cause RL consequences for the things they post. The entire premise they based releasing RealID on the forums was that tying your name to your posts would cause you to behave due to the fear of people identifying that post as coming from you, specifically, the real person -- while at the same time telling everyone that it's still pretty anonymous and safe, stop worrying so much. Idiots twice over.