Acceleration is slowest right after launch, because that's when you have greatest mass. It is also when you most have to content with atmospheric drag. As you get higher, you've burnt off a lot of propellant mass, you're past maxQ, acceleration increases. Listen to some of the other time-velocity marks in the video, and you'll see this bears out.
If you work out the math of various combustion-work cycles (see Otto Cycle, Diesel Cycle), and then take a look at how they are implemented in a typical gasoline or diesel engine, one of the things you immediately find is that efficiency is directly proportional to compression ratio. That is, the more you compress the air (or air-fuel mixture) before igniting the fuel, the better your efficiency.
Gasoline engines tend to be limited in their compression ratios, because if you compress the air-fuel mixture too much, it'll spontaneously ignite while the piston is on the upstroke, a phenomenon called pre-ignition or engine knock (because of how it sounds, I suppose). Diesel fuel burns a bit differently than gasoline, and diesel engines take advantage of spontaneous ignition: they purposefully have high compression ratios to heat up air in the cylinder, then inject the fuel when the piston is at/near the top of its stroke, where it immediately ignites. But diesel, as a fuel, has some practical downsides which has limited its more widespread adoption, primarily how cleanly it burns.
If, on the other hand, you could produce an gasoline engine that uses diesel-like compression ratios, and inject the gasoline at maximum compression, as a diesel engine does, you could have the best of both world: greater efficiency due to high compression ratio, cleaner running due to burning gasoline. But such an engine, for various technical reasons, has historically been difficult to achieve. Maybe these guys are really on to something.
Economies of scale are less important when you are talking about software. The costs associated with software aren't in manufacturing and distribution, which is where economies of scale really matter, but rather in the actual development of it. If you want a more direct example of " huge barriers to manufacturing something better and at a lower price than a monopolist who can count on a huge economy of scale", look to Intel vs. the rest of microprocessor industry. Leaving chip design and process development out of it, a top-of-the-line fab still costs several $billion, which is needless to say a huge barrier to entry. At lower volume there are contract manufacturers like TSMC, but then the economies of scale work against you, if you want to have a produce marketed at a competitive price.
Unfortunately, though, the free version of Code Composer studio that comes with it is terribly crippled by only permitting programs up to some ridiculously small size, like 5 kB. TI's crappy simpliciTI wireless protocol will barely compile in that size.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Just because the disparate software is free doesn't mean getting them to work together requires zero work.
"I know guys: Octave runs natively in Linux, and Android is just Linux. This will be totally easy! In fact, I'll download the source files tonight, whip up a custom build script with one hand while downing a Mountain Dew with the other, and have it done tomorrow."
But as any Android developer will tell you, taking something that runs on a Linux desktop and getting it on Android - making it function properly, getting it to look good, and getting it to interface with the Android UI - it really hard, tedious work. Testing on all the different Android platforms out there alone could keep someone occupied for a year. Is it really so outlandish to ask for some money for the work? $50k will get you a quality software engineer for about half a year (salary + benefits + office overhead). It's not that much.
I may just donate for the hell of it - and I use iOS and Matlab on a daily basis.
I suspect it is from how the image was composited. The article, if you'd bothered to read it, indicates that the camera takes shots using four color filters: RBG, but also an infrared filter. The image you see above is the composite of those four images (with the infrared given a reddish brown tint, which makes all the vegetation look brown), and there may well be some registration error that wasn't accounted for.
One news report stated a farmer saw the plane fly low above him with "the engine" running. It could have been a single engine failure
People's abilities vary, of course, but I doubt most lay-people would not be able to distinguish the roar of one engine versus two. It could also be that the farmer was speaking in broken English, or a bad translation.
That said, yes, it could have been an engine failure. Strange that we haven't heard anything about any mayday calls, which I would expect from pilots that have lost one engine and are able to make a controlled descent from 10,000 to 6,000 ft.
just the right wavelength to be screwed with by my glasses. As I move my head around (or just move my glasses around) the LED appears to move around on the front of the thing. The closer to the edge of my glasses, the farther the displacement.
It's called chromatic aberration, and it is an unavoidable effect of light passing through lenses. When light passes through a lens, it gets bent, which is the whole point. But the amount of bending is wavelength-dependent, and so most lenses will act a bit like a prism and spread the spectrum of the incident light. The stronger the lens, the greater the bending, the more pronounced the effect. The effect is more or less nonexistent along the optical axis, but becomes more pronounced as you go out towards the edges of the lens, where there is both more material to refract through, and the deflection angle is that much greater. This is one reason why big telescopes don't use lenses except for the objectives: the big lenses you'd need for a big telescope would produce too much aberration. Reflector telescopes are, for the most part, immune to this effect, because a mirror reflects all (visible) wavelengths equally.
For myself, with worse than -6 diopter, polycarbonate lenses, I've just learned to live with the effect. It can actually be kinda fun, because it can be like wearing a spectrograph: by putting a light source off to one side of my field of view, I can see the constituent wavelengths. There is no noticeable effect when looking straight ahead.
Perhaps I should have qualified the statement. "Immunity" as I meant it, and as the applicable standards (IEC 60601-1, IEC 61000-4, ETSI EN 300, etc.), mean it, means that the interference may be coupled into the device, but the device must be robust enough to not create a hazardous situation for the user or operator. Depending on the risk classification of the device and the manufacturer's risk mitigation plan, this could mean 1) refraining from doing something untoward, 2) ceasing operation and alerting the user/operator until the interference clears, 3) continuing to operate normally even in the face of interference (up to the power levels of the test). Cases (1) and (2) would be examples of fail safe operation; the third would be fail operative. I think this is not all that different from what you meant.
FYI: medical products, especially ones that have the potential to kill if they malfunction, have to undergo substantial testing to demonstrate their immunity to electromagnetic interference. This includes stuff like TV, radio, and cellular transmissions, microwave ovens and WiFi. There are also special field frequency/strength combinations, such as the typical medical detector or consumer anti-theft device.
However, there aren't regulations regarding immunity to mm-wave and THz scanners, and certainly not at the intensities these devices use. I suspect that, if you were to test a broad range of existing medical products, many of them would fail, because many of them have mm-scale electrical features (especially, circuit board traces) that would be highly susceptible.
Considering an amateur can go from nothing to a satellite in space for a fairly paltry sum (under $100k), and you can build some fairly impressive optics and com gear for a lot less than you could 10 years ago. There is absolutely no reason it should cost as much today to do the same thing we were doing 10 years ago. Moores Law applies here too
Moore's law applies to integrated circuits. Although satellites use plenty of chips, the cost of ICs isn't the major driver of something like an observation platform. The biggest driver is launch cost. The earth-observing satellites aren't big and heavy because their designers are lazy and unaware of current technology; they are big and heavy because there's no getting around it. Being big and heavy, it costs tens of millions of dollars to launch them. The $100k you mention won't barely be enough to get a laptop with some solar panels into orbit.
Designing and building the satellite itself is probably the second biggest driver, because it takes a lot of highly skilled people, specialized facilities, uncommon expertise, and boatloads of testing to create a satellite that can operate reliably and produce accurate and useful data for a decade or longer. Next, there are the direct costs of the instruments themselves, which for an earth observing satellite run a few million apiece, because they are all custom, high-precision, and fairly esoteric.
The third major driver is the cost of operations once it is actually launched. In order for the satellite to be of any use, you need people monitoring and operating the satellite continuously. You'll also need an infrastructure to communicate with it, then gather, process, and disseminate the huge volumes of data it produces. What is the cost of a few dozen skilled, full-time employees working for a decade?
Capable, reliable satellites are just plain expensive, and no amount of DIY gumption will change that anytime soon. If there were cheaper ways to do it, the companies that are dropping a billion dollars on a new communications satellite would probably have found it by now. The only way it's going to get cheaper is by dropping launch costs. Once you don't have to worry about blowing a $50 million rocket launch, you can afford perhaps to make the satellite less robust and long-lived.
There's a lot of essential data that UAVs can't collect, because it requires viewing through the entire atmosphere, or exo-atmospheric observations of the sun.
I'm enthusiastic about kicksat, but you are entirely naive if you think that a bunch of kicksats will replace the capabilities of a $1bn Earth-observing platform. It's not just about having something in orbit; it's about the quality of the instruments. The cameras, spectrometers, etc. in the Earth-orbiting fleet are all multi-million dollar, one-off, high-precision instruments. Amateurs can't duplicate that capability.
NASA is a civilian agency and does not fall under the auspices of the department of defense. Its budget isn't a part of the Defense budget; it's its own separate line item.
NASA does get some money from the military whenever NASA launches or services DoD hardware, but that's from the DoD side of the ledger, not NASA's.
It depends on what you mean by "drafting." If you are referring to the process of documenting a design on a 2-D drawing, then yes, most engineering students learn some amount of drafting. If you are asking whether they sit at a drafting table and create drawings on vellum with pencil, ink, ruler, etc., then the answer is more or less "no." That's not to say that they can't or don't - people will often begin with a quick hand sketch to organize and communicate their thoughts. But formal hand drafting techniques are not taught outside of introductory classes at community colleges.
In a sense, that's a darn shame, because when you are drawing it yourself, as with writing longhand, you have to make sure your thoughts are in order and you are going about it properly. On the other hand, technological innovation would slow to a crawl if we had to resort to hand-drawing everything. Before computers and word processors there was such a thing as a typing pool, where rows of secretaries spent their days cranking out copy using typewriters. Same too with drafting: companies would employ room upon room of drafters to support the work of a small team of engineers. Today I can crank out a quality 2-D drawing of a complicated part, with a half dozen views in orthogonal and arbitrary orientations, with appropriate dimensioning and tolerancing, ready for manufacture, in less than a day. I can make changes to that drawing in the space of minutes. If I were doing it by hand, hours of CAD become days of hand-drawn; days become weeks.
What I do wish is that (mechanical) engineering curricula would spend a little more effort on teaching students not only how to use CAD packages, but how to create proper drawings. It is not just a simple matter of throwing a few 2-D views in there and slapping dimensions on it - at least, not if you want someone else to be able to make the part in such a way that it works. I didn't learn much about that until my first job, not until after a few years' experience using CAD in college and machining most parts myself. When I had start communicating parts to a good machinist, I started to learn how important proper drafting is.
The overwhelming majority of political advertisement spending, while coordinated nationally, is spent on local affiliates. So if you want to annoyed, go after the station managers of WXYZ-TV in Your Town, America, who will gladly take the advertising money from all sides and assault your ears and eyes for the next six months.
People get killed for their couple hundred dollar iPads, if a healthy person has dozens of saleable organs then they could be worth 10s of thousands of dollars
There are important differences between iPads and organs:
While you can fence an iPad most anywhere (pawn shop, streetcorner, ebay, craigslist, etc.), the channels for selling an organ are pretty restrictive in industrialized countries. You can't sell coolers of organs out the back of a truck somewhere, because what the hell is the buyer going to do with it? A patient can't walk into a hospital, cooler in hand, and say "Hey, I found myself a kidney, can someone here install it?" Hospitals won't touch that stuff, partly because it's illegal, and partly because there's no way to know if the organ is still viable, if it's a match for the patient, if the patient can survive the surgery, or if the surgery itself would be successful.
And it's not like there's a profusion of black-market hospitals where you can go with your purchased organs to have them transplanted. Organ transplantation is still hard enough, and the necessary ancillary care complicated enough, that it pretty much can only be done (again, in industrialized countries) in well staffed hospitals. It's not like the patch up guys patching up gunshot wounds for gansters: an organ transplant (at least, one you want to succeed) requires a clean operating room, the skilled surgeon, a few nurses, equipment costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, sterilization facilities, an anesthesiologist and all that goes with it, a recovery bed, 24-7 nursing staff, etc.
While iPads have serial numbers (and MAC addresses, etc.), they are more or less carbon-copy interchangeable. This is not the case for organs. Due to blood types and a dozen other factors, a kidney taken from some random person may be valuable to one patient, or utterly worthless to another. Less than worthless, actually, since a non-matched organ can cause fatal rejection. So in order to have a decent business model for stolen organs, you need a way to type match not only your stock, but also your buyers, and then to put them together in a timely fashion.
Which brings us to another key difference between iPads and organs: shelf life. The viability of an organ outside the body is measured in hours, and so you would need to harvest and offload the goods very quickly. A stolen iPad can sit on the shelf for weeks or months, or be transported across the country, not so for organs.
So while a guy walking down the streets theoretically has a stolen organ value of a tens of thousands of dollars, the reality is that it's so damned difficult to realize any of that money without a substantial national or regional infrastructure that mirrors that of UNOS and hospitals. It's the sort of thing that organized crime could have pulled off in its heyday if it were made up of MDs.
-1 Completely misunderstanding the point of the article and comment.
I can relate to the difficulty in trying to explain the concept of a number line when I was tutoring one of my fellow high school classmates in algebra. She couldn't grasp the concept of negative numbers. I drew a number line, put a zero in the middle, and started marking off the positive integers. She was with me when I illustrated 2 + 3 = 5 on the number line. But there was a (figurative) brick wall between us when I then illustrated 2 - 3 = -1.
No, we just need to dupe some hypochondriac into thinking he has a terminal illness. Jumping into a volcano is a fine way to go out in style. Just keep Meg Ryan out of the picture, ok?
What is more, who the hell fires someone by email, and kindly asks them to hand over company property before leaving? Do they not care about the massive security risk of a just-fired employee still at their computer with full access? I've always been taught that if you are going to fire someone in this day and age, you lock out all their accounts the night before and haul their computer away, then intercept them when they come in the following morning, if only so you can escort them off the premises.
Cars are both space and weight constrained. If the car weighs a lot more (and hybrids and electrics certainly do) it takes more power to accelerate it. It also takes more power to keep it moving on the highway due to increased rolling resistance. More power required implies more battery (or sacrificing power density for energy density), larger power electronics, heavier motor, etc. Cutting the weight of the battery pack by a factor of 2, let alone 10, would be tremendous.
But, to your point, I agree that if the resulting battery is 2x the volume, let alone 10x, it may yet be a deal killer. Creating a network of channels, tubes, and pores to get the oxygen in and out will be tough to accomplish on a tight space.
Slashdot Mirror
Acceleration is slowest right after launch, because that's when you have greatest mass. It is also when you most have to content with atmospheric drag. As you get higher, you've burnt off a lot of propellant mass, you're past maxQ, acceleration increases. Listen to some of the other time-velocity marks in the video, and you'll see this bears out.
If you work out the math of various combustion-work cycles (see Otto Cycle, Diesel Cycle), and then take a look at how they are implemented in a typical gasoline or diesel engine, one of the things you immediately find is that efficiency is directly proportional to compression ratio. That is, the more you compress the air (or air-fuel mixture) before igniting the fuel, the better your efficiency.
Gasoline engines tend to be limited in their compression ratios, because if you compress the air-fuel mixture too much, it'll spontaneously ignite while the piston is on the upstroke, a phenomenon called pre-ignition or engine knock (because of how it sounds, I suppose). Diesel fuel burns a bit differently than gasoline, and diesel engines take advantage of spontaneous ignition: they purposefully have high compression ratios to heat up air in the cylinder, then inject the fuel when the piston is at/near the top of its stroke, where it immediately ignites. But diesel, as a fuel, has some practical downsides which has limited its more widespread adoption, primarily how cleanly it burns.
If, on the other hand, you could produce an gasoline engine that uses diesel-like compression ratios, and inject the gasoline at maximum compression, as a diesel engine does, you could have the best of both world: greater efficiency due to high compression ratio, cleaner running due to burning gasoline. But such an engine, for various technical reasons, has historically been difficult to achieve. Maybe these guys are really on to something.
Economies of scale are less important when you are talking about software. The costs associated with software aren't in manufacturing and distribution, which is where economies of scale really matter, but rather in the actual development of it. If you want a more direct example of " huge barriers to manufacturing something better and at a lower price than a monopolist who can count on a huge economy of scale", look to Intel vs. the rest of microprocessor industry. Leaving chip design and process development out of it, a top-of-the-line fab still costs several $billion, which is needless to say a huge barrier to entry. At lower volume there are contract manufacturers like TSMC, but then the economies of scale work against you, if you want to have a produce marketed at a competitive price.
Unfortunately, though, the free version of Code Composer studio that comes with it is terribly crippled by only permitting programs up to some ridiculously small size, like 5 kB. TI's crappy simpliciTI wireless protocol will barely compile in that size.
Oh sure, but what about my wants. Who's to say that my wants aren't going to corner the drone OS market instead?
Just because the disparate software is free doesn't mean getting them to work together requires zero work.
"I know guys: Octave runs natively in Linux, and Android is just Linux. This will be totally easy! In fact, I'll download the source files tonight, whip up a custom build script with one hand while downing a Mountain Dew with the other, and have it done tomorrow."
But as any Android developer will tell you, taking something that runs on a Linux desktop and getting it on Android - making it function properly, getting it to look good, and getting it to interface with the Android UI - it really hard, tedious work. Testing on all the different Android platforms out there alone could keep someone occupied for a year. Is it really so outlandish to ask for some money for the work? $50k will get you a quality software engineer for about half a year (salary + benefits + office overhead). It's not that much.
I may just donate for the hell of it - and I use iOS and Matlab on a daily basis.
I suspect it is from how the image was composited. The article, if you'd bothered to read it, indicates that the camera takes shots using four color filters: RBG, but also an infrared filter. The image you see above is the composite of those four images (with the infrared given a reddish brown tint, which makes all the vegetation look brown), and there may well be some registration error that wasn't accounted for.
People's abilities vary, of course, but I doubt most lay-people would not be able to distinguish the roar of one engine versus two. It could also be that the farmer was speaking in broken English, or a bad translation.
That said, yes, it could have been an engine failure. Strange that we haven't heard anything about any mayday calls, which I would expect from pilots that have lost one engine and are able to make a controlled descent from 10,000 to 6,000 ft.
Although Pirate Bay and Anonymous are regular /. fodder, you know this story got approved only for the headline. Let the jokes commence!
It's called chromatic aberration, and it is an unavoidable effect of light passing through lenses. When light passes through a lens, it gets bent, which is the whole point. But the amount of bending is wavelength-dependent, and so most lenses will act a bit like a prism and spread the spectrum of the incident light. The stronger the lens, the greater the bending, the more pronounced the effect. The effect is more or less nonexistent along the optical axis, but becomes more pronounced as you go out towards the edges of the lens, where there is both more material to refract through, and the deflection angle is that much greater. This is one reason why big telescopes don't use lenses except for the objectives: the big lenses you'd need for a big telescope would produce too much aberration. Reflector telescopes are, for the most part, immune to this effect, because a mirror reflects all (visible) wavelengths equally.
For myself, with worse than -6 diopter, polycarbonate lenses, I've just learned to live with the effect. It can actually be kinda fun, because it can be like wearing a spectrograph: by putting a light source off to one side of my field of view, I can see the constituent wavelengths. There is no noticeable effect when looking straight ahead.
Perhaps I should have qualified the statement. "Immunity" as I meant it, and as the applicable standards (IEC 60601-1, IEC 61000-4, ETSI EN 300, etc.), mean it, means that the interference may be coupled into the device, but the device must be robust enough to not create a hazardous situation for the user or operator. Depending on the risk classification of the device and the manufacturer's risk mitigation plan, this could mean 1) refraining from doing something untoward, 2) ceasing operation and alerting the user/operator until the interference clears, 3) continuing to operate normally even in the face of interference (up to the power levels of the test). Cases (1) and (2) would be examples of fail safe operation; the third would be fail operative. I think this is not all that different from what you meant.
FYI: medical products, especially ones that have the potential to kill if they malfunction, have to undergo substantial testing to demonstrate their immunity to electromagnetic interference. This includes stuff like TV, radio, and cellular transmissions, microwave ovens and WiFi. There are also special field frequency/strength combinations, such as the typical medical detector or consumer anti-theft device.
However, there aren't regulations regarding immunity to mm-wave and THz scanners, and certainly not at the intensities these devices use. I suspect that, if you were to test a broad range of existing medical products, many of them would fail, because many of them have mm-scale electrical features (especially, circuit board traces) that would be highly susceptible.
Moore's law applies to integrated circuits. Although satellites use plenty of chips, the cost of ICs isn't the major driver of something like an observation platform. The biggest driver is launch cost. The earth-observing satellites aren't big and heavy because their designers are lazy and unaware of current technology; they are big and heavy because there's no getting around it. Being big and heavy, it costs tens of millions of dollars to launch them. The $100k you mention won't barely be enough to get a laptop with some solar panels into orbit.
Designing and building the satellite itself is probably the second biggest driver, because it takes a lot of highly skilled people, specialized facilities, uncommon expertise, and boatloads of testing to create a satellite that can operate reliably and produce accurate and useful data for a decade or longer. Next, there are the direct costs of the instruments themselves, which for an earth observing satellite run a few million apiece, because they are all custom, high-precision, and fairly esoteric.
The third major driver is the cost of operations once it is actually launched. In order for the satellite to be of any use, you need people monitoring and operating the satellite continuously. You'll also need an infrastructure to communicate with it, then gather, process, and disseminate the huge volumes of data it produces. What is the cost of a few dozen skilled, full-time employees working for a decade?
Capable, reliable satellites are just plain expensive, and no amount of DIY gumption will change that anytime soon. If there were cheaper ways to do it, the companies that are dropping a billion dollars on a new communications satellite would probably have found it by now. The only way it's going to get cheaper is by dropping launch costs. Once you don't have to worry about blowing a $50 million rocket launch, you can afford perhaps to make the satellite less robust and long-lived.
There's a lot of essential data that UAVs can't collect, because it requires viewing through the entire atmosphere, or exo-atmospheric observations of the sun.
I'm enthusiastic about kicksat, but you are entirely naive if you think that a bunch of kicksats will replace the capabilities of a $1bn Earth-observing platform. It's not just about having something in orbit; it's about the quality of the instruments. The cameras, spectrometers, etc. in the Earth-orbiting fleet are all multi-million dollar, one-off, high-precision instruments. Amateurs can't duplicate that capability.
Well, if you lose your observational capacity, it's a perfect example of non-sightedness.
NASA is a civilian agency and does not fall under the auspices of the department of defense. Its budget isn't a part of the Defense budget; it's its own separate line item.
NASA does get some money from the military whenever NASA launches or services DoD hardware, but that's from the DoD side of the ledger, not NASA's.
It depends on what you mean by "drafting." If you are referring to the process of documenting a design on a 2-D drawing, then yes, most engineering students learn some amount of drafting. If you are asking whether they sit at a drafting table and create drawings on vellum with pencil, ink, ruler, etc., then the answer is more or less "no." That's not to say that they can't or don't - people will often begin with a quick hand sketch to organize and communicate their thoughts. But formal hand drafting techniques are not taught outside of introductory classes at community colleges.
In a sense, that's a darn shame, because when you are drawing it yourself, as with writing longhand, you have to make sure your thoughts are in order and you are going about it properly. On the other hand, technological innovation would slow to a crawl if we had to resort to hand-drawing everything. Before computers and word processors there was such a thing as a typing pool, where rows of secretaries spent their days cranking out copy using typewriters. Same too with drafting: companies would employ room upon room of drafters to support the work of a small team of engineers. Today I can crank out a quality 2-D drawing of a complicated part, with a half dozen views in orthogonal and arbitrary orientations, with appropriate dimensioning and tolerancing, ready for manufacture, in less than a day. I can make changes to that drawing in the space of minutes. If I were doing it by hand, hours of CAD become days of hand-drawn; days become weeks.
What I do wish is that (mechanical) engineering curricula would spend a little more effort on teaching students not only how to use CAD packages, but how to create proper drawings. It is not just a simple matter of throwing a few 2-D views in there and slapping dimensions on it - at least, not if you want someone else to be able to make the part in such a way that it works. I didn't learn much about that until my first job, not until after a few years' experience using CAD in college and machining most parts myself. When I had start communicating parts to a good machinist, I started to learn how important proper drafting is.
The overwhelming majority of political advertisement spending, while coordinated nationally, is spent on local affiliates. So if you want to annoyed, go after the station managers of WXYZ-TV in Your Town, America, who will gladly take the advertising money from all sides and assault your ears and eyes for the next six months.
Or you could simply turn off the damn TV.
There are important differences between iPads and organs: While you can fence an iPad most anywhere (pawn shop, streetcorner, ebay, craigslist, etc.), the channels for selling an organ are pretty restrictive in industrialized countries. You can't sell coolers of organs out the back of a truck somewhere, because what the hell is the buyer going to do with it? A patient can't walk into a hospital, cooler in hand, and say "Hey, I found myself a kidney, can someone here install it?" Hospitals won't touch that stuff, partly because it's illegal, and partly because there's no way to know if the organ is still viable, if it's a match for the patient, if the patient can survive the surgery, or if the surgery itself would be successful.
And it's not like there's a profusion of black-market hospitals where you can go with your purchased organs to have them transplanted. Organ transplantation is still hard enough, and the necessary ancillary care complicated enough, that it pretty much can only be done (again, in industrialized countries) in well staffed hospitals. It's not like the patch up guys patching up gunshot wounds for gansters: an organ transplant (at least, one you want to succeed) requires a clean operating room, the skilled surgeon, a few nurses, equipment costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, sterilization facilities, an anesthesiologist and all that goes with it, a recovery bed, 24-7 nursing staff, etc.
While iPads have serial numbers (and MAC addresses, etc.), they are more or less carbon-copy interchangeable. This is not the case for organs. Due to blood types and a dozen other factors, a kidney taken from some random person may be valuable to one patient, or utterly worthless to another. Less than worthless, actually, since a non-matched organ can cause fatal rejection. So in order to have a decent business model for stolen organs, you need a way to type match not only your stock, but also your buyers, and then to put them together in a timely fashion. Which brings us to another key difference between iPads and organs: shelf life. The viability of an organ outside the body is measured in hours, and so you would need to harvest and offload the goods very quickly. A stolen iPad can sit on the shelf for weeks or months, or be transported across the country, not so for organs.
So while a guy walking down the streets theoretically has a stolen organ value of a tens of thousands of dollars, the reality is that it's so damned difficult to realize any of that money without a substantial national or regional infrastructure that mirrors that of UNOS and hospitals. It's the sort of thing that organized crime could have pulled off in its heyday if it were made up of MDs.
I can relate to the difficulty in trying to explain the concept of a number line when I was tutoring one of my fellow high school classmates in algebra. She couldn't grasp the concept of negative numbers. I drew a number line, put a zero in the middle, and started marking off the positive integers. She was with me when I illustrated 2 + 3 = 5 on the number line. But there was a (figurative) brick wall between us when I then illustrated 2 - 3 = -1.
No, we just need to dupe some hypochondriac into thinking he has a terminal illness. Jumping into a volcano is a fine way to go out in style. Just keep Meg Ryan out of the picture, ok?
What is more, who the hell fires someone by email, and kindly asks them to hand over company property before leaving? Do they not care about the massive security risk of a just-fired employee still at their computer with full access? I've always been taught that if you are going to fire someone in this day and age, you lock out all their accounts the night before and haul their computer away, then intercept them when they come in the following morning, if only so you can escort them off the premises.
Cars are both space and weight constrained. If the car weighs a lot more (and hybrids and electrics certainly do) it takes more power to accelerate it. It also takes more power to keep it moving on the highway due to increased rolling resistance. More power required implies more battery (or sacrificing power density for energy density), larger power electronics, heavier motor, etc. Cutting the weight of the battery pack by a factor of 2, let alone 10, would be tremendous.
But, to your point, I agree that if the resulting battery is 2x the volume, let alone 10x, it may yet be a deal killer. Creating a network of channels, tubes, and pores to get the oxygen in and out will be tough to accomplish on a tight space.