As soon as you start putting something on the market, especially if you are not selling directly to the end customer (i.e., through a distributor or VAR), you have to assume that your competitors are going to get ahold of your products. Expect them to be reverse engineered. Trade Secrets do not exist once it's out in the wild.
Frankly, I'd be surprised if Cisco didn't have this stuff. I would also be surprised if Juniper didn't have Cisco products.
You can be positive that K Street and its myriad of lobbying firms will be more than happy to employ him.
That's pretty much what I was thinking when I heard this snippet from his concession speech: "It's disappointing sure but I believe in this country. I believe there is opportunity around the next corner for all of us."
My second thought was along these lines: oh, sure, there's plenty of opportunity around the next corner - for him. Going from being a career politician to a $10mil/year lobbyist isn't exactly the same kind of opportunity available to everyone else, though.
The problem I see with hovercraft (on the same roads as automobiles) is acceleration. The wheels do a lot more for the car than simply supporting the weight - contact with the road surface is absolutely essential for accelerating forward, braking, turning, and keeping the front of the car pointed in the direction of travel. In a hovercraft, you need some alternate mechanism for that - usually pushing with or against the air (i.e., propellers and fans). How does the performance of those alternate means for acceleration compare to rubber on the road? Without a prototype to examine or independent road tests, one cannot say for sure.
This was my first reaction. This new material may not be suitable all on its own, but rather become an element in a composite structure - like carbon fiber and fiberglass. In that case, it probably won't be biodegradable at all, because it will be encased in epoxy, which is pretty much permanent.
Electricity isn't a networking standard; it's part of the laws of physics.
Actually, battery chargers are kinda like networking standards. Yes, you have voltage and heavy gauge wire, but you also have two-way communication between the pack and the charger. Most of that is contained within the car itself, but it extends to external charge sources, too. Have a look at the SAE charging standard for EVs. Tesla does not adhere to this standard, either for its connector or communications, which I will guess is the bulk of what they will be releasing. Still, standards like these make explicit or implicit assumptions about the underlying hardware and software, which is what makes this more interesting.
I know that proper spelling and grammar don't mean shit to most people these days, but would it really have been so difficult for the submitter or editors to include an apostrophe here and there.
Kids With Operators Manual Alert Bank Officials: "We Hacked Your ATM"
I had to read this a few times to figure out what was going on. Why do I care about "kids with operators"? How does one "manual alert" someone? Then I realized that we were talking about an Operator's (or Operators') Manual, and that the submitter and editors were just illiterate.
This should be interesting, and should spur some development,
but...
I doubt that you could use a Tesla-like Supercharger to charge a battery other than one made by Tesla. I'm not talking about DRM, I'm talking about the architecture of the battery pack itself - its charging characteristics, its safety features, its cooling system, and so on down to the level of the individual 18650 cells. Those aspects are still heavily protected - licensing and manufacturing the packs and powertrain is a side business for Tesla. So what looks like a move to open up the world could, like other standards, become a way to lock in a particular proprietary design.
I still think it's pretty cool, though. If it sheds more light on how Tesla has designed and constructed their pack, which is a fine technology, as well as directly showing ways to charge Li-Ion packs quickly, then I think this is a benefit to anyone interested in how electricity is used and stored (i.e., everyone). But I also like to keep in mind that Musk, for all his altruism, is still a capitalist and wants his vision of the future to be the one to succeed.
I don't get it. It needs a tap water refill every few months, but needs to be swapped out entirely every month? I drive more than 3000km every month. How is this supposed to be practical? Is this geared towards people that don't drive much at all? Even then, the battery will likely need to be replaced over 100 times during the life of the car.
Siiiiigh. From TFA:
The battery can extend the range of an electric car... when used in conjunction with the vehicle's regular lithium-ion battery....
Because the car would still rely on its regular rechargable lithium-ion battery most of the time and would switch to the aluminum-air battery as a backup only if the lithium-ion battery ran out, and because most car trips are 50 kilometres or less, Alcoa estimates the aluminum-air batteries would only need to be changed about once a year.
May I suggest that next time, if you're a bit confused, you RTFA before jumping straight into the comments and loudly proclaiming how much you don't get it.
It makes about as much sense as other primary (i.e., nonrechargeable) batteries: alkaline AAs, lithium coin cells, and the like. Depending on where you live, those may or may not be readily recycled. In most of the United States, for instance, they end up in landfills. Too bad, too, there's a decent amount of refined metals (manganese, nickel, steel, lithium, etc.) in those things that could be recovered. I guess we'll just leave them as a buried resource for future generations to dig out of the ground again.
I am a little puzzled about why they would need to add battery coolant heaters: if their inverter is 95% efficient, that would already give them 1-7kW of waste heat they can use as a heater to get batteries to operating temperature fairly quickly if they bypass the radiator until then.
For similar reasons to why people in cold climates have engine block heaters. Certainly there's lots of waste heat from an ICE to warm things up, but it is also a matter of reducing wear and tear. Using waste heat from the inverter (and the pack's own self-heating) is a sound strategy, and one that I'm sure they use, but that only works once the vehicle is operating. If the battery pack is frozen, you may not get the thing to start at all.
Additionally, keeping the engine block from such extreme (and rapid) temperature swings keeps things running smoothly and for longer. The same is true for batteries and electronics. Operating Li-Ion batteries when they are stone cold is bad for their cycle life and greatly reduces their available output (energy capacity, obviously, but also maximum sustainable current). In some chemistries, the electrolyte can actually freeze (or near enough to it), such that your output drops to zero. Keeping all the cells at the same temperature is necessary to prevent cell drift and capacity loss over time. Thermal cycling all those electrical connections in the pack (many of which are welded) is probably a bad idea, too. Batteries really, truly, do their best when they are kept at a uniform, constant, human-tolerable temperature
I am not entirely sure what the poster means by "Open Source Freedom." I'm sure there's a serious discussion to be had there, but my first reaction was "Freedom is Not Free (as in beer)."
50%, 90%, 99%. I stand by my original statement: it is "man-ratable", and not yet "man-rated". I fully expect that they've done their homework and will, after additional flight demonstrations, receive the certification. But they haven't gotten it yet.
Actually, my quibble isn't with the gender connotations of the statement, but with the verb tense of the statement. The V2 hasn't, as far as I know, actually received certification for manned space flight. Rather, it has been designed (and probably some testing complete) to be able to receive such a rating.
It hasn't been rated yet, just that it could be and is intended to be. In that sense, it is more accurate to call it "man ratable" (the subjunctive tense) rather than "man rated" (past tense).
if an engineer, who designed the B52, would have imagined, in their wildest dreams, that the B52 would still be a major weapon of war over 50 years after it was built
If they thought about it at all, they probably were wondering if humanity itself would still be around in 50 years.
I don't believe that an uneven gender ratio is necessarily a bad thing
I have not particular evidence to back up this next assertion, but...
Men and women utilize and consume technology is roughly equal amounts. Not just sitting in front of computers trolling facebook, but also driving cars, accessing medical care, communicating on mobile devices, pay taxes to fund the military-industrial complex, and burning through a whopping amount of energy in the process. So, to the extent that men and women are equal users of technology, I think it prudent to make sure they are equal contributors in technology. Put differently (and along the lines of your final statement) - if women aren't helping to develop new technology, then we're probably missing something important.
Had someone stuck this nuclear waste in an Egyptian pyramid, it would still be there, 3000 years later
No - the pyramids are still there, but the contents were cleaned out ages ago. The entire history of humanity shows that we aren't very good at hiding, protecting, or forgetting things that are valuable, beautiful, or otherwise useful to other people. All the pyramids were broken into an looted. Building pyramid tombs were abandoned because they couldn't be protected, and the pharaohs started being buried in underground tombs in the Valley of Kings. Those, too, were rediscovered and looted. Tutankhamen's tomb was such a big deal because it was one of the few was succcessfully lost/forgotten, and thus not raided.
But makers shy away from nature's composite because it has a stigma
It can be hard to guarantee the homogeneity and consistency in wood that auto manufacturers are used to having in their raw materials. A manufacturer can specify and source sheet steel for a car body, and be reasonably confident that the material properties will vary by, at most, 5% from lot to lot. Wood is much more highly variable, meaning that you need to build a larger margin of safety into the design.
I'm not saying this prevents wood and other natural materials from being used in automobiles, it just requires different design and manufacturing processes.
Dutch railways announced that from next year on, 100% of their operations will run on electric power from renewable sources, mainly wind
This makes me wonder: if enough heavy industries sign on to using wind power, they can become a flexible load to balance the variable supply of wind? For instance, if Dutch railways has 10,000 cars moving around, and the output of wind drops by X%, could they slow their cars down by Y% to help compensate? Inversely, if there's a sudden surge in wind, could they speed their cars up, using the kinetic energy of their moving fleet as a sort of rolling grid storage.
Granted, this kind of demand is not infinitely flexible - the railroads still need to meet certain schedules, trains safely travel only so fast, certain industrial processes can't be sped up or slowed down quickly, etc. - but there's still substantial elasticity and capacitance in these big-scale users.
So you're saying that you support expensive energy, and further with that creating misery for those who can't afford cheap energy?
Well, making things expensive is one surefire way to ensure that people use less of it, which is something that the U.S. drastically needs to do. Humanity as a whole has gotten a lot of mileage from cheap (i.e., fossil) energy, but I think we have to grapple with the notion that we can't afford to do that forever. If energy prices rise, there's tremendous pressure to use less of it. That doesn't mean going back to the stone age; inexpensive technology exists to allow the U.S. to have the same economic output with much lower energy input. We're just wasteful and too short-sighted (i.e., don't have the proper incentives) to do better.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, at that point, you may as well have a (wired) dock, or a cable. It's not like it's that hard to get power into a phone.
As soon as you start putting something on the market, especially if you are not selling directly to the end customer (i.e., through a distributor or VAR), you have to assume that your competitors are going to get ahold of your products. Expect them to be reverse engineered. Trade Secrets do not exist once it's out in the wild.
Frankly, I'd be surprised if Cisco didn't have this stuff. I would also be surprised if Juniper didn't have Cisco products.
Only in my nightmares...
There's a Wile E Coyote reference to be made somewhere...
That's pretty much what I was thinking when I heard this snippet from his concession speech: "It's disappointing sure but I believe in this country. I believe there is opportunity around the next corner for all of us."
My second thought was along these lines: oh, sure, there's plenty of opportunity around the next corner - for him. Going from being a career politician to a $10mil/year lobbyist isn't exactly the same kind of opportunity available to everyone else, though.
The problem I see with hovercraft (on the same roads as automobiles) is acceleration. The wheels do a lot more for the car than simply supporting the weight - contact with the road surface is absolutely essential for accelerating forward, braking, turning, and keeping the front of the car pointed in the direction of travel. In a hovercraft, you need some alternate mechanism for that - usually pushing with or against the air (i.e., propellers and fans). How does the performance of those alternate means for acceleration compare to rubber on the road? Without a prototype to examine or independent road tests, one cannot say for sure.
This was my first reaction. This new material may not be suitable all on its own, but rather become an element in a composite structure - like carbon fiber and fiberglass. In that case, it probably won't be biodegradable at all, because it will be encased in epoxy, which is pretty much permanent.
Actually, battery chargers are kinda like networking standards. Yes, you have voltage and heavy gauge wire, but you also have two-way communication between the pack and the charger. Most of that is contained within the car itself, but it extends to external charge sources, too. Have a look at the SAE charging standard for EVs. Tesla does not adhere to this standard, either for its connector or communications, which I will guess is the bulk of what they will be releasing. Still, standards like these make explicit or implicit assumptions about the underlying hardware and software, which is what makes this more interesting.
I had to read this a few times to figure out what was going on. Why do I care about "kids with operators"? How does one "manual alert" someone? Then I realized that we were talking about an Operator's (or Operators') Manual, and that the submitter and editors were just illiterate.
This should be interesting, and should spur some development,
but...
I doubt that you could use a Tesla-like Supercharger to charge a battery other than one made by Tesla. I'm not talking about DRM, I'm talking about the architecture of the battery pack itself - its charging characteristics, its safety features, its cooling system, and so on down to the level of the individual 18650 cells. Those aspects are still heavily protected - licensing and manufacturing the packs and powertrain is a side business for Tesla. So what looks like a move to open up the world could, like other standards, become a way to lock in a particular proprietary design.
I still think it's pretty cool, though. If it sheds more light on how Tesla has designed and constructed their pack, which is a fine technology, as well as directly showing ways to charge Li-Ion packs quickly, then I think this is a benefit to anyone interested in how electricity is used and stored (i.e., everyone). But I also like to keep in mind that Musk, for all his altruism, is still a capitalist and wants his vision of the future to be the one to succeed.
Siiiiigh. From TFA:
May I suggest that next time, if you're a bit confused, you RTFA before jumping straight into the comments and loudly proclaiming how much you don't get it.
Why on Earth would you want to do that to yourself?
It makes about as much sense as other primary (i.e., nonrechargeable) batteries: alkaline AAs, lithium coin cells, and the like. Depending on where you live, those may or may not be readily recycled. In most of the United States, for instance, they end up in landfills. Too bad, too, there's a decent amount of refined metals (manganese, nickel, steel, lithium, etc.) in those things that could be recovered. I guess we'll just leave them as a buried resource for future generations to dig out of the ground again.
For similar reasons to why people in cold climates have engine block heaters. Certainly there's lots of waste heat from an ICE to warm things up, but it is also a matter of reducing wear and tear. Using waste heat from the inverter (and the pack's own self-heating) is a sound strategy, and one that I'm sure they use, but that only works once the vehicle is operating. If the battery pack is frozen, you may not get the thing to start at all.
Additionally, keeping the engine block from such extreme (and rapid) temperature swings keeps things running smoothly and for longer. The same is true for batteries and electronics. Operating Li-Ion batteries when they are stone cold is bad for their cycle life and greatly reduces their available output (energy capacity, obviously, but also maximum sustainable current). In some chemistries, the electrolyte can actually freeze (or near enough to it), such that your output drops to zero. Keeping all the cells at the same temperature is necessary to prevent cell drift and capacity loss over time. Thermal cycling all those electrical connections in the pack (many of which are welded) is probably a bad idea, too. Batteries really, truly, do their best when they are kept at a uniform, constant, human-tolerable temperature
I am not entirely sure what the poster means by "Open Source Freedom." I'm sure there's a serious discussion to be had there, but my first reaction was "Freedom is Not Free (as in beer)."
50%, 90%, 99%. I stand by my original statement: it is "man-ratable", and not yet "man-rated". I fully expect that they've done their homework and will, after additional flight demonstrations, receive the certification. But they haven't gotten it yet.
Actually, my quibble isn't with the gender connotations of the statement, but with the verb tense of the statement. The V2 hasn't, as far as I know, actually received certification for manned space flight. Rather, it has been designed (and probably some testing complete) to be able to receive such a rating.
It hasn't been rated yet, just that it could be and is intended to be. In that sense, it is more accurate to call it "man ratable" (the subjunctive tense) rather than "man rated" (past tense).
But strangely enough, it only works if you think in Russian.
(Movie references [1], [2], [3])
If they thought about it at all, they probably were wondering if humanity itself would still be around in 50 years.
I have not particular evidence to back up this next assertion, but...
Men and women utilize and consume technology is roughly equal amounts. Not just sitting in front of computers trolling facebook, but also driving cars, accessing medical care, communicating on mobile devices, pay taxes to fund the military-industrial complex, and burning through a whopping amount of energy in the process. So, to the extent that men and women are equal users of technology, I think it prudent to make sure they are equal contributors in technology. Put differently (and along the lines of your final statement) - if women aren't helping to develop new technology, then we're probably missing something important.
No - the pyramids are still there, but the contents were cleaned out ages ago. The entire history of humanity shows that we aren't very good at hiding, protecting, or forgetting things that are valuable, beautiful, or otherwise useful to other people. All the pyramids were broken into an looted. Building pyramid tombs were abandoned because they couldn't be protected, and the pharaohs started being buried in underground tombs in the Valley of Kings. Those, too, were rediscovered and looted. Tutankhamen's tomb was such a big deal because it was one of the few was succcessfully lost/forgotten, and thus not raided.
Yes, but is the 3D-printer driven using a Raspberry Pi?
It can be hard to guarantee the homogeneity and consistency in wood that auto manufacturers are used to having in their raw materials. A manufacturer can specify and source sheet steel for a car body, and be reasonably confident that the material properties will vary by, at most, 5% from lot to lot. Wood is much more highly variable, meaning that you need to build a larger margin of safety into the design.
I'm not saying this prevents wood and other natural materials from being used in automobiles, it just requires different design and manufacturing processes.
This makes me wonder: if enough heavy industries sign on to using wind power, they can become a flexible load to balance the variable supply of wind? For instance, if Dutch railways has 10,000 cars moving around, and the output of wind drops by X%, could they slow their cars down by Y% to help compensate? Inversely, if there's a sudden surge in wind, could they speed their cars up, using the kinetic energy of their moving fleet as a sort of rolling grid storage.
Granted, this kind of demand is not infinitely flexible - the railroads still need to meet certain schedules, trains safely travel only so fast, certain industrial processes can't be sped up or slowed down quickly, etc. - but there's still substantial elasticity and capacitance in these big-scale users.
Well, making things expensive is one surefire way to ensure that people use less of it, which is something that the U.S. drastically needs to do. Humanity as a whole has gotten a lot of mileage from cheap (i.e., fossil) energy, but I think we have to grapple with the notion that we can't afford to do that forever. If energy prices rise, there's tremendous pressure to use less of it. That doesn't mean going back to the stone age; inexpensive technology exists to allow the U.S. to have the same economic output with much lower energy input. We're just wasteful and too short-sighted (i.e., don't have the proper incentives) to do better.