Mike,
Let me preface by saying I'm 90% engineer and 10% whatever. I have a very shaky understanding of micro/macro economics. Seven years ago I spent $150 on a water cooling rig to overclock my processor because it made economic sense at the time. It doesn't anymore. I still enjoy a quiet computer though.
What galls me is that there WAS a market for the EV1. People wanted it and were willing to pay for it.
What galls me is that it was a political decision driven by CORPORATE economic interests despite Joe sixpack economics and pollution concerns that killed it.
I agree some great ideas were just not economically viable at the time. Some examples here.
http://www.miguelcarrasco.net/miguelcarrasco/2006/ 10/10_biggest_comp.html
My point is I think the electric car is a step in the right direction, hybrids too, but their adoption is being thwarted not by economics but by special interests in the auto/oil industry and their govt. cronies.
If the EV1 were on sale today I would buy one because 95% of my driving is 60mi/day and electricity is $0.10/kWh so it makes sense. But I can't buy one. Would you if it were available?
Right the windings weigh more than an engine, sure. Look up the specs of a MODERN electric motor sometime.
Ever drive a BMW? Seems like you don't know what you're talking about AC. &FU2BTW.
"_That_ is the wire I'm talking about. That mile of wire in those coils"
If thats the wire you're talking about contributing to the weight of the car, you're an idiot.
F=B cross product I.
Don't try to tell an EE how motors work. You only make yourself look even more foolish.
Now exactly what kind of physics data would you like? I lived near and studied under Resnick so brush off your freshman text, check out the authors (the other one is Halliday) and either dispute one of my claims with facts or STFU.
"In terms of raw energy consumption, the total amount of energy the US consumes as electricty from some source right now is within the same order of magnitude as the amount of energy we use burning gasoline in cars."
Oh really?
http://www.teslamotors.com/learn_more/foreign_oil. php
Forgive my formatting.
visit http://www.teslamotors.com/
for what an electric car can do.
Making it affordable is another story.
GM had the chance in 1986 with the EV1 but they caved.
Fortunately Honda and Toyota are selling hybrids.
If you can't research the efficiency of electric vs internal combustion engines I can't help you.
It is well known that its 90/40 at least.
That being said.. Show me an electric car on the market today.. So the whole point is moot.
watch www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com and then tell me who's point is moot.
"And gas can come from recycled cooking oil. The key is that it won't in the US any time soon."
No, the key is we can make better use of our limited resources whether the oil companies and you like it or not.
"That's because electricity is indirectly subsidized by your tax dollars. All government regulated monoplies are."
Right, and Iraq and Halliburton and the Afghan pipeline are all about freedom. I could write a book about the idiocy of that statement alone.
"I'll grant you the ability to manage pollution distribution. But historically this isn't a rose garden as plant waste leaks into public drinking water, etc."
I never promised you a rose garden.
"Hahahaha." Laugh all you want. In the end fewer parts == fewer problems == lower cost. Once economy of scale kicks in. Compare a turntable to an iPod.
"I'd like to see an electric car beat a mustang." Google Tesla (the car), then show me a Mustang that does
0-60 in 3.6 secs. (I had a '67 stang once, awesome car)
"Granted, regenerative breaking is nice, but we're not saving the world with it, as it merely reduces the effect of one type of innefficiency."
We're not trying to save the world all at once, just trying to improve efficency a bit at a time.
"But right now we've got lead-acid baby."
No, right now we've got NiMH baby. But only for your laptops because Texaco bought out the Ovonics car NiMH battery technology from GM. Sucks eh?
"Incremental, so it's a long ways off. For the forseeable future, higher tech will likely mean greater expense per unit."
In automotive terms, sadly you're right. But only because of powerful interests hellbent on maintaining the status quo and their profit margins.
In 1986 an IBM PCAT with a 12MHz, 640k RAM, 20MB Seagate ST251 harddrive cost $5000.
Today we have at least 1000x the performance for $500.
If cars followed that trend............
Enlighten my ass.
Re-calculate with the realization that most (90%) cars only need to drive 60 mi/day.
Your "performance" figures rely on the assumption that everyone must travel 400miles per fillup.
"That big ol' combustion engine _and_ the fuel tank still weighs a fraction of what the batteries would weigh."
Yeah, a LARGE fraction.
You trot out arguments and cherrypicked data much like a PR drone from GM or Exxon conveniently neglecting real world requirements.
Must hate the Prius.
"Let's also assume that you have an ideal system where the electrical car is 100% efficient. It isn't, but let's pretend for a bit, shall we? "
Yeah lets pretend that 95% is comparable to 40% shall we?
And give me a break with the wiring size from battery weight bullshit.
My BMW 328iS has the battery in the trunk for a 50/50 weight distribution, the cable don't mean shit.
"Offtopic, but you did make his point."
No, I answered his question. In short it is "to improve efficiency and reduce pollution, even if incrementally"
What you dismiss as irrelevant will become relevant to you when you are paying $10/gal for gas and have no alternative.
We can start weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels for cars and going to electric is a viable option.
Fuel for aircraft, pharmaceuticals, plastics etc. will all still need oil and there are no viable alternatives yet.
Personally I think we should accelerate gen IV nuclear reactor construction and build a superconducting backbone.
"Unfortunately that just boils down to "it could get better in the future" optimism"
Just because incremental advances are not enough for YOU doesn't mean they should be ignored until it is too late.
The demand for gas hasn't increased 300% in 6 years. While I understand your point I'm sure you'd
agree that oil supplies/prices depend on many more factors than does electricity.
The situation is ameliorated by the fact that cars will mostly recharge overnight, offpeak, levelling the load.
We need to build more generation IV nuclear reactors and consider a superconducting electrical backbone for the
US rather than waste money on Bush's hydrogen fantasy.
"What is the point of having an electric car if you're just going to charge it by burning coal and oil?"
Electric motors are much more efficient. Electricity can come from non-polluting sources. The cost of electricity hasn't risen 300% in six years. Pollution from a few sources is more easily managed and disperses less than from millions of ground level sources. Electric cars are simpler mechanically, more reliable and easier to repair. Electric cars accelerate faster and can use regenerative braking. Existing range limitations can be overcome with improved battery chemistry.
see www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com to see why we're not driving them and why all the EV1's were destroyed.
If you always assume that the administration is lying and that things are much worse than you're being told, you will rarely be proven wrong. First Bush said it was only international calls, he was lying. Now they're saying it's only the phone numbers and time stamps that they're collecting not the content of the call. Just for grins let's assume they're lying and see how much data we're talking about.
Assume:
1) 5 calls per day at five minutes per call.
2) All 400 million Americans do this so 200 million connections.
3) Phone bandwidth is 3kHz so a 6 kbps data stream is sufficient to accurately recreate the audio (without compression).
200 million x 5 x 5 x 6000 bits/second x 60 secs/minute = 1.8 quadrillion bits or 225 terabytes.
You can buy a terabyte drive (2x 500GB Maxtors) for less than $1000. This scenario would require about a quarter million dollars for storage.
Even if everyone spent 24hrs/day on the phone the cost for storing this data ($15M) is trivial for NSA's (black) budget.
Now consider that NSA has literally acres of computers under Ft. Meade to process this data with voice recognition and hotword flagging so they probably don't need much more than a couple days worth of storage.
Sorting out the flagged audio with human interpreters is difficult but recording it is not.
Immerse yourself in the writing of great writers and you will become a better writer.
The "Elements of Style" by W. Strunk and E.B. White is an excellent first step.
Vonnegut would be a good second.
$60 / month for up to 12 DRM laden, non transferrable 128kbps windows audio files.
If the labels are dictating the terms you know the deal will suck ass.
The war began as planned. The Israeli pilots took off well before dawn and streaked across Lebanon and northern Iraq, high above Kirkuk. Flying US-made F-15 and F-16s, the Israelis separated over the mountains of western Iran, the pilots gesturing a last minute show of confidence in their mission, maintaining radio silence.
Just before the sun rose over Tehran, moments before the Muslim call to prayer, the missiles struck their targets. While US Air Force AWACS planes circled overhead--listening, watching, recording--heavy US bombers followed minutes later. Bunker-busters and mini-nukes fell on dozens of targets while Iranian anti-aircraft missiles sped skyward.
The ironically named Bushehr nuclear power plant crumbled to dust. Russian technicians and foreign nationals scurried for safety. Most did not make it.
Targets in Saghand and Yazd, all of them carefully chosen many months before by Pentagon planners, were destroyed. The uranium enrichment facility in Natanz; a heavy water plant and radioisotope facility in Arak; the Ardekan Nuclear Fuel Unit; the Uranium Conversion Facility and Nuclear Technology Center in Isfahan; were struck simultaneously by USAF and Israeli bomber groups.
The Tehran Nuclear Research Center, the Tehran Molybdenum, Iodine and Xenon Radioisotope Production Facility, the Tehran Jabr Ibn Hayan Multipurpose Laboratories, the Kalaye Electric Company in the Tehran suburbs were destroyed.
Iranian fighter jets rose in scattered groups. At least those Iranian fighter planes that had not been destroyed on the ground by swift and systematic air strikes from US and Israeli missiles. A few Iranian fighters even launched missiles, downing the occasional attacker, but American top guns quickly prevailed in the ensuing dogfights.
The Iranian air force, like the Iranian navy, never really knew what hit them. Like the slumbering US sailors at Pearl Harbor, the pre-dawn, pre-emptive attack wiped out fully half the Iranian defense forces in a matter of hours.
By mid-morning, the second and third wave of US/Israeli raiders screamed over the secondary targets. The only problem now, the surprising effectiveness of the Iranian missile defenses. The element of surprise lost, US and Israeli warplanes began to fall from the skies in considerable numbers to anti-aircraft fire.
At 7:35 AM, Tehran time, the first Iranian anti-ship missile destroyed a Panamanian oil tanker, departing from Kuwait and bound for Houston. Launched from an Iranian fighter plane, the Exocet split the ship in half and set the ship ablaze in the Strait of Hormuz. A second and third tanker followed, black smoke billowing from the broken ships before they blew up and sank. By 8:15 AM, all ship traffic on the Persian Gulf had ceased.
US Navy ships, ordered earlier into the relative safety of the Indian Ocean, south of their base in Bahrain, launched counter strikes. Waves of US fighter planes circled the burning wrecks in the bottleneck of Hormuz but the Iranian fighters had fled.
At 9 AM, Eastern Standard Time, many hours into the war, CNN reported a squadron of suicide Iranian fighter jets attacking the US Navy fleet south of Bahrain. Embedded reporters aboard the ships--sending live feeds directly to a rapt audience of Americans just awakening--reported all of the Iranian jets destroyed, but not before the enemy planes launched dozens of Exocet and Sunburn anti-ship missiles. A US aircraft carrier, cruiser and two destroyers suffered direct hits. The cruiser blew up and sank, killing 600 men. The aircraft carrier sank an hour later.
By mid-morning, every military base in Iran was partially or wholly destroyed. Sirens blared and fires blazed from hundreds of fires. Explosions rocked Tehran and the electrical power failed. The Al Jazeerah news station in Tehran took a direct hit
Slashdot Mirror
Mike, Let me preface by saying I'm 90% engineer and 10% whatever. I have a very shaky understanding of micro/macro economics. Seven years ago I spent $150 on a water cooling rig to overclock my processor because it made economic sense at the time. It doesn't anymore. I still enjoy a quiet computer though. What galls me is that there WAS a market for the EV1. People wanted it and were willing to pay for it. What galls me is that it was a political decision driven by CORPORATE economic interests despite Joe sixpack economics and pollution concerns that killed it. I agree some great ideas were just not economically viable at the time. Some examples here. http://www.miguelcarrasco.net/miguelcarrasco/2006/ 10/10_biggest_comp.html
My point is I think the electric car is a step in the right direction, hybrids too, but their adoption is being thwarted not by economics but by special interests in the auto/oil industry and their govt. cronies.
If the EV1 were on sale today I would buy one because 95% of my driving is 60mi/day and electricity is $0.10/kWh so it makes sense. But I can't buy one. Would you if it were available?
Ok, I stand corrected, yet I maintain electric cars are a step in the right direction.
Right the windings weigh more than an engine, sure. Look up the specs of a MODERN electric motor sometime. Ever drive a BMW? Seems like you don't know what you're talking about AC. &FU2BTW.
"_That_ is the wire I'm talking about. That mile of wire in those coils"
If thats the wire you're talking about contributing to the weight of the car, you're an idiot.
F=B cross product I.
Don't try to tell an EE how motors work. You only make yourself look even more foolish.
Now exactly what kind of physics data would you like?
I lived near and studied under Resnick so brush off your freshman text, check out the authors (the other one
is Halliday) and either dispute one of my claims with facts or STFU.
"In terms of raw energy consumption, the total amount of energy the US consumes as electricty from some source right now is within the same order of magnitude as the amount of energy we use burning gasoline in cars." Oh really? http://www.teslamotors.com/learn_more/foreign_oil. php
Forgive my formatting. visit http://www.teslamotors.com/ for what an electric car can do. Making it affordable is another story. GM had the chance in 1986 with the EV1 but they caved. Fortunately Honda and Toyota are selling hybrids.
If you can't research the efficiency of electric vs internal combustion engines I can't help you. It is well known that its 90/40 at least. That being said.. Show me an electric car on the market today.. So the whole point is moot. watch www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com and then tell me who's point is moot. "And gas can come from recycled cooking oil. The key is that it won't in the US any time soon." No, the key is we can make better use of our limited resources whether the oil companies and you like it or not. "That's because electricity is indirectly subsidized by your tax dollars. All government regulated monoplies are." Right, and Iraq and Halliburton and the Afghan pipeline are all about freedom. I could write a book about the idiocy of that statement alone. "I'll grant you the ability to manage pollution distribution. But historically this isn't a rose garden as plant waste leaks into public drinking water, etc." I never promised you a rose garden. "Hahahaha." Laugh all you want. In the end fewer parts == fewer problems == lower cost. Once economy of scale kicks in. Compare a turntable to an iPod. "I'd like to see an electric car beat a mustang." Google Tesla (the car), then show me a Mustang that does 0-60 in 3.6 secs. (I had a '67 stang once, awesome car) "Granted, regenerative breaking is nice, but we're not saving the world with it, as it merely reduces the effect of one type of innefficiency." We're not trying to save the world all at once, just trying to improve efficency a bit at a time. "But right now we've got lead-acid baby." No, right now we've got NiMH baby. But only for your laptops because Texaco bought out the Ovonics car NiMH battery technology from GM. Sucks eh? "Incremental, so it's a long ways off. For the forseeable future, higher tech will likely mean greater expense per unit." In automotive terms, sadly you're right. But only because of powerful interests hellbent on maintaining the status quo and their profit margins. In 1986 an IBM PCAT with a 12MHz, 640k RAM, 20MB Seagate ST251 harddrive cost $5000. Today we have at least 1000x the performance for $500. If cars followed that trend ............
Waste as much of their time as possible and buy nothing.
Wag their dog and amuse yourselves.
It's the right thing to do.
Enlighten my ass. Re-calculate with the realization that most (90%) cars only need to drive 60 mi/day. Your "performance" figures rely on the assumption that everyone must travel 400miles per fillup. "That big ol' combustion engine _and_ the fuel tank still weighs a fraction of what the batteries would weigh." Yeah, a LARGE fraction. You trot out arguments and cherrypicked data much like a PR drone from GM or Exxon conveniently neglecting real world requirements. Must hate the Prius. "Let's also assume that you have an ideal system where the electrical car is 100% efficient. It isn't, but let's pretend for a bit, shall we? " Yeah lets pretend that 95% is comparable to 40% shall we? And give me a break with the wiring size from battery weight bullshit. My BMW 328iS has the battery in the trunk for a 50/50 weight distribution, the cable don't mean shit.
"Offtopic, but you did make his point." No, I answered his question. In short it is "to improve efficiency and reduce pollution, even if incrementally" What you dismiss as irrelevant will become relevant to you when you are paying $10/gal for gas and have no alternative. We can start weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels for cars and going to electric is a viable option. Fuel for aircraft, pharmaceuticals, plastics etc. will all still need oil and there are no viable alternatives yet. Personally I think we should accelerate gen IV nuclear reactor construction and build a superconducting backbone. "Unfortunately that just boils down to "it could get better in the future" optimism" Just because incremental advances are not enough for YOU doesn't mean they should be ignored until it is too late.
The demand for gas hasn't increased 300% in 6 years. While I understand your point I'm sure you'd agree that oil supplies/prices depend on many more factors than does electricity. The situation is ameliorated by the fact that cars will mostly recharge overnight, offpeak, levelling the load. We need to build more generation IV nuclear reactors and consider a superconducting electrical backbone for the US rather than waste money on Bush's hydrogen fantasy.
I would agree.
:-)
In the interim biofuel hybrids can ease the transition.
The ideal would be a small 200kW nuclear reactor in the car itself. It would also fly
"What is the point of having an electric car if you're just going to charge it by burning coal and oil?"
Electric motors are much more efficient.
Electricity can come from non-polluting sources.
The cost of electricity hasn't risen 300% in six years.
Pollution from a few sources is more easily managed and disperses less than from millions of ground level sources.
Electric cars are simpler mechanically, more reliable and easier to repair.
Electric cars accelerate faster and can use regenerative braking.
Existing range limitations can be overcome with improved battery chemistry.
see www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com to see why we're not driving them and why all the EV1's were destroyed.
Offtopic but you did ask.
For about a second.
FYI Frank Zappa didn't use drugs.
Costs more, does less.
By fans, family, friends and animals alike. RIP.
people will be throwing out getting on the plane will be harmless why not just give it away to people *leaving* the airport?
Nitro Glycerin
If you always assume that the administration is lying and that things are much worse than you're being told, you will rarely be proven wrong. First Bush said it was only international calls, he was lying. Now they're saying it's only the phone numbers and time stamps
that they're collecting not the content of the call. Just for grins let's assume they're lying and see how much data we're talking about.
Assume:
1) 5 calls per day at five minutes per call.
2) All 400 million Americans do this so 200 million connections.
3) Phone bandwidth is 3kHz so a 6 kbps data stream is sufficient to accurately recreate the audio (without compression).
200 million x 5 x 5 x 6000 bits/second x 60 secs/minute = 1.8 quadrillion bits or 225 terabytes.
You can buy a terabyte drive (2x 500GB Maxtors) for less than $1000. This scenario would require about a quarter million dollars for storage.
Even if everyone spent 24hrs/day on the phone the cost for storing this data ($15M) is trivial for NSA's (black) budget.
Now consider that NSA has literally acres of computers under Ft. Meade to process this data with voice recognition and
hotword flagging so they probably don't need much more than a couple days worth of storage.
Sorting out the flagged audio with human interpreters is difficult but recording it is not.
Immerse yourself in the writing of great writers and you will become a better writer. The "Elements of Style" by W. Strunk and E.B. White is an excellent first step. Vonnegut would be a good second.
Calculators certainly caused my long division skills to deterioate.
$60 / month for up to 12 DRM laden, non transferrable 128kbps windows audio files. If the labels are dictating the terms you know the deal will suck ass.
Day One - The War With Iran
By Douglas Herman
The war began as planned. The Israeli pilots took off well before dawn
and streaked across Lebanon and northern Iraq, high above Kirkuk. Flying
US-made F-15 and F-16s, the Israelis separated over the mountains of
western Iran, the pilots gesturing a last minute show of confidence in
their mission, maintaining radio silence.
Just before the sun rose over Tehran, moments before the Muslim call to
prayer, the missiles struck their targets. While US Air Force AWACS
planes circled overhead--listening, watching, recording--heavy US
bombers followed minutes later. Bunker-busters and mini-nukes fell on
dozens of targets while Iranian anti-aircraft missiles sped skyward.
The ironically named Bushehr nuclear power plant crumbled to dust.
Russian technicians and foreign nationals scurried for safety. Most did
not make it.
Targets in Saghand and Yazd, all of them carefully chosen many months
before by Pentagon planners, were destroyed. The uranium enrichment
facility in Natanz; a heavy water plant and radioisotope facility in
Arak; the Ardekan Nuclear Fuel Unit; the Uranium Conversion Facility and
Nuclear Technology Center in Isfahan; were struck simultaneously by USAF
and Israeli bomber groups.
The Tehran Nuclear Research Center, the Tehran Molybdenum, Iodine and
Xenon Radioisotope Production Facility, the Tehran Jabr Ibn Hayan
Multipurpose Laboratories, the Kalaye Electric Company in the Tehran
suburbs were destroyed.
Iranian fighter jets rose in scattered groups. At least those Iranian
fighter planes that had not been destroyed on the ground by swift and
systematic air strikes from US and Israeli missiles. A few Iranian
fighters even launched missiles, downing the occasional attacker, but
American top guns quickly prevailed in the ensuing dogfights.
The Iranian air force, like the Iranian navy, never really knew what hit
them. Like the slumbering US sailors at Pearl Harbor, the pre-dawn,
pre-emptive attack wiped out fully half the Iranian defense forces in a
matter of hours.
By mid-morning, the second and third wave of US/Israeli raiders screamed
over the secondary targets. The only problem now, the surprising
effectiveness of the Iranian missile defenses. The element of surprise
lost, US and Israeli warplanes began to fall from the skies in
considerable numbers to anti-aircraft fire.
At 7:35 AM, Tehran time, the first Iranian anti-ship missile destroyed a
Panamanian oil tanker, departing from Kuwait and bound for Houston.
Launched from an Iranian fighter plane, the Exocet split the ship in
half and set the ship ablaze in the Strait of Hormuz. A second and third
tanker followed, black smoke billowing from the broken ships before they
blew up and sank. By 8:15 AM, all ship traffic on the Persian Gulf had
ceased.
US Navy ships, ordered earlier into the relative safety of the Indian
Ocean, south of their base in Bahrain, launched counter strikes. Waves
of US fighter planes circled the burning wrecks in the bottleneck of
Hormuz but the Iranian fighters had fled.
At 9 AM, Eastern Standard Time, many hours into the war, CNN reported a
squadron of suicide Iranian fighter jets attacking the US Navy fleet
south of Bahrain. Embedded reporters aboard the ships--sending live
feeds directly to a rapt audience of Americans just awakening--reported
all of the Iranian jets destroyed, but not before the enemy planes
launched dozens of Exocet and Sunburn anti-ship missiles. A US aircraft
carrier, cruiser and two destroyers suffered direct hits. The cruiser
blew up and sank, killing 600 men. The aircraft carrier sank an hour later.
By mid-morning, every military base in Iran was partially or wholly
destroyed. Sirens blared and fires blazed from hundreds of fires.
Explosions rocked Tehran and the electrical power failed. The Al
Jazeerah news station in Tehran took a direct hit
Hockey yes.
RPI sucks at football, always has.