Electric cars should be much less complex than you petrol/diesel cars. No need for fancy gearboxes like in your average petrol car.
Think of all the parts that are dropped or simplified when you move from petrol/diesel to electric:
- Drive shaft (you can put the electric motors right where you need them)
- Gearbox - can be much less complex, no need for multiple ratios
- Alternators - vehicle is powered by electricity directly
- Crankshafts - no need
- Exhaust systems - no exhaust
- Noise reduction systems - your car's silencer system is an engineering marvel
- Complex cooling systems - electric motors don't produce as much waste heat
So you save by not having to produce all of those parts in the first place - although you do have to produce the battery.
As many have pointed out, once on the road, you are saving about half of the input energy compared to a petrol car, and that adds up. If you spend £5,000 on petrol per year currently, this could come down to £2,500 or less in electricity/energy costs.
We are probably not there yet, but electric cars could be far more efficient in every respect than petrol cars in the future.
And we are only getting started. Imagine if you install solar and maybe one day install you own battery change station at home. Suddenly you are able to charge a spare battery all day and swap it when you drive into your garage. Hello free fuel.
Your spare battery pack could also double as an emergency electricity source in the event of a blackout.
This could be huge. We have only begun to scratch the surface in terms of the possibilities here.
Have to agree with GP above. You certainly have a messed up perspective on life.
Prison is punishment. The only reason for anyone to be reformed is that they accept their wrong doing and that the punishment was justified and fit the crime.
You can start a fight and still claim self-defense when the other person turns the conflict into a lethal conflict.
That would be ridiculous in my opinion. Once you start something, you should not be able to claim self defence if the situation turns against you. If you go and slap Mike Tyson, you can't suddenly claim self defence and shoot him because he starts to pummel you into the ground.
I think with appropriate incentives, increasing efficiency can always be a good thing.
We just need policies (tax and others) that change the payoffs to the employer of employing people as opposed to machines. Or just shorten the working week and prevent employers from requiring that their workers do 50 hour weeks with 50% unemployment when everyone could do 25 hour weeks, enjoy the same quality of life, have a more equitable society (not equal, but equitable) and let people relax more.
I hate password policies that force me to change the password every 2 months. So what do people do? Yes, that's right, they either add a 1, 2, 3 etc to the end of their password, and hopefully by the time they get to 9, the password system allows them to go back to 1.
Or worse, just use the month and year as the password. Uses letters? Check. Use numbers? Check. Another symbol? Just add one at the end or something.
I think we need to distinguish between online and offline attacks.
For an online attack, you could just impose a 10 second limit before another password can be tried. Trying to brute force at a rate of 6 tries per minute is likely to be frustrating. It would take an attacker a year to get through 5 million passwords from a dictionary. Basically, it would make it not very worthwhile.
In addition, you could use an algorithm that basically lengthens the time until the next allowed password attempt for each additional failed password attempt. If you can tie this in with some way of determining this based on the IP address that is originating the failed attempts, then the complexity of passwords for a system where the attacker does not have physical access is not terribly important.
And yes, if my bank account was being obviously targeted, I would prefer that my online access be shut down rather than allow the attacker to get a good chance of getting my money because I might not like to be inconvenienced.
That article doesn't back that assertion up. It just says it, and gives no proof. And it certainly doesn't specify who is killed by the police or where these are criminals who involve themselves in shootouts with the police, or innocent bystanders.
There is a huge difference between being a criminal shot by the police, and being an innocent attendee at a marathon, who is then killed by a bomb. Or being in the office and having a plane crash through the window.
Some people in Zimbabwe indeed managed to pay off their mortgages for next to nothing because of hyperinflation. But all semblance of investment activity ceased. What banker is going to give anyone a mortgage in such an environment when the repayment will be worth far less than the initial loan. And guessing future inflation won't work either. Hyperinflation feeds on itself. The moment people expect inflation to be 1000%, they price their products with a built in 1100% inflation margin, so inflation becomes 1100%. You cannot plan anything in such an economy. No one invests. No one. Hyperinflation will kills an economy dead!
No, no and no. Nice little strawman you have created there. If you had read all three sentences, you would have realised he was stopped too.
If you are driving behind another car, and you rear end them, then you were driving too close. You were tailgating. If you are distracted by a cell phone, then your total braking distance increases quite substantially, so what would have been a reasonable following distance becomes an inadequate one. Nothing causes me more discomfort than someone driving too close behind me. If something happens, and I have to brake suddenly, they will hit me. If you have more people in the road behind, you get the stupid 100 car pileups.
Google makes it clear they do not delete emails. And they also make it very clear how you can permanently delete emails. Click on "delete" in the webmail interface.
It would have been very easy for Yahoo to provide users with a "clean" inbox. All they had to do was to map the gmail inbox to the Yahoo inbox, create a Gmail "all mail" folder, and recreate all other folders/labels to match what Gmail was providing. The only downside would have been where users had tagged emails with multiple labels, and they would have created duplicates where Google only has a single email, but that's about it.
Google does not sell info to advertisers. Google sells adverts based on your info. If you are going to bash Google, then at least get your damn facts straight!
Not only that, but I am sure that if IBM were to try to buy AMD for example, the cross-licensing agreement between Intel and AMD would also become null and void, and IBM would not be able to create x86. So basically, Intel can invest an unlimited amount of money to keep themselves ahead of AMD by process tech. I wish AMD would go for broke and seriously invest in process tech to keep themselves in the game and get their share closer to 50%.
Intel can't, r won't, kill x86 for the same reason that Microsoft won't completely change and why they made sure to keep Windows applications compatible across releases. It allows them to maintain their pseudo-monopoly on desktop. If there was a competition for a new PC architecture, IBM and a bunch of Chinese manufacturers would be right there competing on an equal footing. No way Intel allows that to happen. Intel would rather have an AMD than a proper competitor. AMD shields them from antitrust and so the x86 situation is brilliant for them.
My first mp3 player was as iAudio M5. The iPod was a far superior product. Heck it was superior to the X5.
Many makers of mp3 players didn't get that to have 20/30/40GB of music you needed to browse it fast, yet accurately. None touched the scroll wheel in ease of use.
None also touched the infrastructure that Apple built around the iPod. iTunes was a big deal, and other companies just didn't care to build something like that to go with the music.
I am not a big supporter of congressional districts, but I do appreciate the inherent "localism" that they provide, i.e. each congressman (or woman) representing a local "constituency". However, one of the problem this throws up, especially when considering the popular vote, is that the first past the post voting system favours parties with narrow margins in more congressional districts rather than the party with more overall support (not that the two won't coincide, but they often don't as the examples of Michigan, Virginia and Pennsylvania show).
I cannot see why the USA cannot have use the popular vote for presidential elections. No one actually votes for the electors. No one even knows them, and their role in the electoral process is largely ceremonial. They are an artefact from a time when it made sense to try and avoid conducting a popular vote election (pre-telegraph) by having each state vote for president. People vote for the candidate they prefer, therefore their vote should just add to his/her total.
In the case of congressional seats, something like mixed member proportional representation which allows for house seats to be awarded more or less in line with the vote share.
A technical solution is needed to eliminate gerrymandering, and the mixed member proportional representation does that by not giving an advantage to an incumbent by letting them almost literally move the goal posts.Basically, if a party wants an overall majority, they should win 50%+1.
This is possibly banging my head against a brick wall, but it ought to be obvious that I was referring to the system that was proposed, rather than a system that is already operating. In case it wasn't, then let me make it clear I was referring to the proposal that were being kicked around as discussed in this article on Fox News.
The point was that, rather fortuitously for the Republicans of course, these plans were only being mooted in states that usually vote Democrat in Presidential elections, but happen to have Republican controlled state senates and Republican governors.
If you believe that the fact that these changes, if implemented, have the completely unintentional, but happy, side-effect of nullifying the Democrat vote in states that are increasingly leaning blue, then I have a bridge to sell you.
The only time a politician proposes a change in the way people vote is when it advantages them. Because of the distribution of vote in states where Democrats have a larger support, Republicans would not only win seats where they otherwise wouldn't, they actually win more seats that the Democrats. Don't believe me, look up Not Gerrymandering, but Districting: More Evidence on How Democrats Won the Popular Vote but Lost the Congress. Basically, they lost the popular vote in both presidential and congressional races, but managed to win big in the house races. The Republicans had =47% of the house vote in Michigan but got 64% of the seats.
So the Republicans wanted to engineer a way to win in states were they are a minority vote party. As I said, utterly repugnant. Basically, without a wholesale redistribution of the population in those states to produce election results that reflected the popular will, Democrats would never win in those states.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a classic case of the issue with cross-subsidisation. People who live in apartments are subsidising those who live in suburbs.
The USPS could raise prices to send to certain neighbourhoods I guess.
Before things improve, they will get worse.
Probably and unfortunately. Public isn't interested in holding police accountable until the degree of brutality reaches people like them.
FTFY
As long as people believe it only happens to people who are "bad", they will not only tolerate it. They will quietly root for the police.
Electric cars should be much less complex than you petrol/diesel cars. No need for fancy gearboxes like in your average petrol car.
Think of all the parts that are dropped or simplified when you move from petrol/diesel to electric:
- Drive shaft (you can put the electric motors right where you need them)
- Gearbox - can be much less complex, no need for multiple ratios
- Alternators - vehicle is powered by electricity directly
- Crankshafts - no need
- Exhaust systems - no exhaust
- Noise reduction systems - your car's silencer system is an engineering marvel
- Complex cooling systems - electric motors don't produce as much waste heat
So you save by not having to produce all of those parts in the first place - although you do have to produce the battery.
As many have pointed out, once on the road, you are saving about half of the input energy compared to a petrol car, and that adds up. If you spend £5,000 on petrol per year currently, this could come down to £2,500 or less in electricity/energy costs.
We are probably not there yet, but electric cars could be far more efficient in every respect than petrol cars in the future.
And we are only getting started. Imagine if you install solar and maybe one day install you own battery change station at home. Suddenly you are able to charge a spare battery all day and swap it when you drive into your garage. Hello free fuel.
Your spare battery pack could also double as an emergency electricity source in the event of a blackout.
This could be huge. We have only begun to scratch the surface in terms of the possibilities here.
That's like saying Usain Bolt gets paid for running for 10 seconds!
Have to agree with GP above. You certainly have a messed up perspective on life.
Prison is punishment. The only reason for anyone to be reformed is that they accept their wrong doing and that the punishment was justified and fit the crime.
Punishing the innocent cannot make them reform.
You can start a fight and still claim self-defense when the other person turns the conflict into a lethal conflict.
That would be ridiculous in my opinion. Once you start something, you should not be able to claim self defence if the situation turns against you. If you go and slap Mike Tyson, you can't suddenly claim self defence and shoot him because he starts to pummel you into the ground.
I think with appropriate incentives, increasing efficiency can always be a good thing.
We just need policies (tax and others) that change the payoffs to the employer of employing people as opposed to machines. Or just shorten the working week and prevent employers from requiring that their workers do 50 hour weeks with 50% unemployment when everyone could do 25 hour weeks, enjoy the same quality of life, have a more equitable society (not equal, but equitable) and let people relax more.
I hate password policies that force me to change the password every 2 months. So what do people do? Yes, that's right, they either add a 1, 2, 3 etc to the end of their password, and hopefully by the time they get to 9, the password system allows them to go back to 1.
Or worse, just use the month and year as the password. Uses letters? Check. Use numbers? Check. Another symbol? Just add one at the end or something.
I think we need to distinguish between online and offline attacks.
For an online attack, you could just impose a 10 second limit before another password can be tried. Trying to brute force at a rate of 6 tries per minute is likely to be frustrating. It would take an attacker a year to get through 5 million passwords from a dictionary. Basically, it would make it not very worthwhile.
In addition, you could use an algorithm that basically lengthens the time until the next allowed password attempt for each additional failed password attempt. If you can tie this in with some way of determining this based on the IP address that is originating the failed attempts, then the complexity of passwords for a system where the attacker does not have physical access is not terribly important.
And yes, if my bank account was being obviously targeted, I would prefer that my online access be shut down rather than allow the attacker to get a good chance of getting my money because I might not like to be inconvenienced.
Some people don't hate their own kids.
That article doesn't back that assertion up. It just says it, and gives no proof. And it certainly doesn't specify who is killed by the police or where these are criminals who involve themselves in shootouts with the police, or innocent bystanders.
There is a huge difference between being a criminal shot by the police, and being an innocent attendee at a marathon, who is then killed by a bomb. Or being in the office and having a plane crash through the window.
Some people in Zimbabwe indeed managed to pay off their mortgages for next to nothing because of hyperinflation. But all semblance of investment activity ceased. What banker is going to give anyone a mortgage in such an environment when the repayment will be worth far less than the initial loan. And guessing future inflation won't work either. Hyperinflation feeds on itself. The moment people expect inflation to be 1000%, they price their products with a built in 1100% inflation margin, so inflation becomes 1100%. You cannot plan anything in such an economy. No one invests. No one. Hyperinflation will kills an economy dead!
No, no and no. Nice little strawman you have created there. If you had read all three sentences, you would have realised he was stopped too.
If you are driving behind another car, and you rear end them, then you were driving too close. You were tailgating. If you are distracted by a cell phone, then your total braking distance increases quite substantially, so what would have been a reasonable following distance becomes an inadequate one. Nothing causes me more discomfort than someone driving too close behind me. If something happens, and I have to brake suddenly, they will hit me. If you have more people in the road behind, you get the stupid 100 car pileups.
Google makes it clear they do not delete emails. And they also make it very clear how you can permanently delete emails. Click on "delete" in the webmail interface.
It would have been very easy for Yahoo to provide users with a "clean" inbox. All they had to do was to map the gmail inbox to the Yahoo inbox, create a Gmail "all mail" folder, and recreate all other folders/labels to match what Gmail was providing. The only downside would have been where users had tagged emails with multiple labels, and they would have created duplicates where Google only has a single email, but that's about it.
The solution was simple. Yahoo borked it.
Google does not sell info to advertisers. Google sells adverts based on your info. If you are going to bash Google, then at least get your damn facts straight!
They didn't blow anything with Serenity.
Need to mind the mineshaft gap!
Yes right, because no company wants their product to be on every desk and in every home.
Not only that, but I am sure that if IBM were to try to buy AMD for example, the cross-licensing agreement between Intel and AMD would also become null and void, and IBM would not be able to create x86. So basically, Intel can invest an unlimited amount of money to keep themselves ahead of AMD by process tech. I wish AMD would go for broke and seriously invest in process tech to keep themselves in the game and get their share closer to 50%.
Intel can't, r won't, kill x86 for the same reason that Microsoft won't completely change and why they made sure to keep Windows applications compatible across releases. It allows them to maintain their pseudo-monopoly on desktop. If there was a competition for a new PC architecture, IBM and a bunch of Chinese manufacturers would be right there competing on an equal footing. No way Intel allows that to happen. Intel would rather have an AMD than a proper competitor. AMD shields them from antitrust and so the x86 situation is brilliant for them.
My first mp3 player was as iAudio M5. The iPod was a far superior product. Heck it was superior to the X5.
Many makers of mp3 players didn't get that to have 20/30/40GB of music you needed to browse it fast, yet accurately. None touched the scroll wheel in ease of use.
None also touched the infrastructure that Apple built around the iPod. iTunes was a big deal, and other companies just didn't care to build something like that to go with the music.
Everytime someone says (or types) "phablet", a little kitten dies somewhere. Just thought to let you know.
I am not a big supporter of congressional districts, but I do appreciate the inherent "localism" that they provide, i.e. each congressman (or woman) representing a local "constituency". However, one of the problem this throws up, especially when considering the popular vote, is that the first past the post voting system favours parties with narrow margins in more congressional districts rather than the party with more overall support (not that the two won't coincide, but they often don't as the examples of Michigan, Virginia and Pennsylvania show).
I cannot see why the USA cannot have use the popular vote for presidential elections. No one actually votes for the electors. No one even knows them, and their role in the electoral process is largely ceremonial. They are an artefact from a time when it made sense to try and avoid conducting a popular vote election (pre-telegraph) by having each state vote for president. People vote for the candidate they prefer, therefore their vote should just add to his/her total.
In the case of congressional seats, something like mixed member proportional representation which allows for house seats to be awarded more or less in line with the vote share.
A technical solution is needed to eliminate gerrymandering, and the mixed member proportional representation does that by not giving an advantage to an incumbent by letting them almost literally move the goal posts.Basically, if a party wants an overall majority, they should win 50%+1.
This is possibly banging my head against a brick wall, but it ought to be obvious that I was referring to the system that was proposed, rather than a system that is already operating. In case it wasn't, then let me make it clear I was referring to the proposal that were being kicked around as discussed in this article on Fox News.
The point was that, rather fortuitously for the Republicans of course, these plans were only being mooted in states that usually vote Democrat in Presidential elections, but happen to have Republican controlled state senates and Republican governors.
If you believe that the fact that these changes, if implemented, have the completely unintentional, but happy, side-effect of nullifying the Democrat vote in states that are increasingly leaning blue, then I have a bridge to sell you.
The only time a politician proposes a change in the way people vote is when it advantages them. Because of the distribution of vote in states where Democrats have a larger support, Republicans would not only win seats where they otherwise wouldn't, they actually win more seats that the Democrats. Don't believe me, look up Not Gerrymandering, but Districting: More Evidence on How Democrats Won the Popular Vote but Lost the Congress. Basically, they lost the popular vote in both presidential and congressional races, but managed to win big in the house races. The Republicans had =47% of the house vote in Michigan but got 64% of the seats.
So the Republicans wanted to engineer a way to win in states were they are a minority vote party. As I said, utterly repugnant. Basically, without a wholesale redistribution of the population in those states to produce election results that reflected the popular will, Democrats would never win in those states.