>There is no link between the number of electric cars on the road and an increased desire for a clean grid.
You are right. But there will be an increased focus on electrical generation techniques, and there is you chance to improve how that is done, both in terms of cost and the environment.
The bottom line is, the entire infrastructure has to be replaced with something that doesn't depend on fossil fuels, both the electricity generation infrastructure and the personal transportation infrastructure.
I'm willing to start with cars, because 1) I have some measure of control over that, 2) I can do it now, and 3) it will have to be done eventually anyway. If you want to wait around for the top to get switched over to something else before worrying about your car, be my guest. Myself, my next car buying decision is going to be based only on the cost to run it. If that is electricity, then that is what it will be. I'm strongly considering this one: http://www.hybridtechnologies.com/smartcar_order.p hp
We all pay through our health that is affected by pollution. We pay by the loss of natural environments and habitats that we can no longer enjoy. We also pay through taxation used for cleaning up environmental messes. There are numerous ways in which we all collectively pay for crapping where we live.
>There is however a ton of things to invent for a clean grid.
Not really. We've got viable solutions for nuclear, solar, and wind power right now. They just haven't been economically feasible. That is about to change with the price of gasoline going where it is going.
>We're decades away from a clean grid.
So? We're decades away from everyone having electric cars, too.
>We've had plug in pure electric cars for decades.
But there hasn't been financial incentive to make them acceptable. That is changing with the price of gasoline going through the roof. I can tell you right now my next car purchase will be 100% driven by fuel economy. I don't care if it runs on gasoline or horse manure, but it's going to be equivalent to a 100MPG car today in terms of cost to operate.
>If we have electric cars and a dirty grid there's no gain.
The thing is, if we have electric cars the entire focus now goes to electricity generation plants. THEN you can focus on how to do that in a green, or at least economic fashion. And market forces are going to drive that in a big way. When the energy needs of all gasoline burning cars are converted to electricity, they are going to have to add electrical generation capacity in a big way. My guess is the only viable way to satisfy that need is through nuclear power. Fine by me.
>If we have a clean grid and petro cars there is a gain.
Without something to drive the demand for electricity, there aren't going to be any improvements to the grid, green or otherwise, for a long time. Electric cars will increase demand for electricity, and legislation can determine how those new centralized facilities will operate.
>You are completely correct. I want grid then car.
Without the car, nothing is going to change on the grid. Or rather, change will come much more slowly because there will be not nearly as dramatic an increase in demand. And then, once you do have a green grid, then you'll have to tackle all the cars anyway!
No, the cars are the catalyst to getting our personal transportation needs satisfied by electricity. Electric cars in the short term may do nothing for the environment. But the increased electrical demand is going to require new ways of generating electricity, and there is your opportunity to go green. Frankly I don't care if it's green, I just want cheap, and I don't want the funding going to the Middle East.
>Electric cars aren't doing anything _now_.
Except increasing the demand for and focus on electricity generation.
>Until we have a clean grid petrol cars and electric cars are both fossil fuel based.
But electric cars will hasten the move to more efficient grids, whereas efficient grids may or may not hasten the move to electric cars.
If we work slowly on getting all-electric cars, something that is technologically feasible/today/, we can worry about improving the power plants as we go.
I see it as a much much easier hurdle to overcome - you don't have to invent anything - all the technology necessary to make it happen is available right now.
You want a car that is powered by something that doesn't exist today.
Absolutely resources should be directed at cleaner sources of electricity, and no doubt they will be. But we need to do something about the cars _now_. There is no need to wait until the centralized electrical generation facilities are all green before getting rid of ungreen "applicances" that use electricity in favor of fossil fuels.
I see comments like YOURS and/I/ don't understand them at all.
Look, everyone understands that there are also problems with a centralized power distribution system.
It's just obvious that is going to be a WHOLE lot easier to work on maximizing the efficiencies of a centralized distriubtion system using currently available technologies than it is going to be trying to come up with a new technology for decentralized power generation.
From what I've been reading lately hybrids aren't all they are cracked up to be, especially if you do a lot of long-distance driving with little stop-and-go to make use of regenerative braking. They still generate all their electricity from fossil fuel.
Pure electric cars ARE different from a standard car.
Power plants can be made to run off of nuclear, solar, or wind.
I get so sick of the argument that says, "Well, all you are doing is moving where the fossil fuels are burned". Sure - today.
But which do you think has a greater chance of happening any time soon? Coming up with cars that don't burn fossil fuels or coming up with power plants that don't burn fossil fuels?
The battle for electricity is 75% won. The distribution system is in place. The technology is over 100 years old. All you have to do is change the method of electricity generation and the centralized generation facilities.
The answer is not to be satisfied with gas being at least $12 a gallon, nor living like a hermit. The answer is to continue to grow and evolve and enjoy ever-higher qualities of life while coming up with new and better ways to sustain it.
>And the source of the energy to power your car when you plug it in at night? >Oil, or worse, coal, though possibly nuclear...
Ah that old saw.
Look, the current electrical system ain't perfect. But we have a WHOLE lot more chance of coming up with a more efficient/centralized/ power generation system than we do replacing the entire transportation system with more efficient power generation systems.
Nuclear. Solar. Wind. There are technologies in place TODAY that can satisfy the demand for electricity. Let's use it and move forward.
>It needs to go at least 300 miles or else it's irrelevant for anything but commuting, and I gave up on commuting by car a long time ago.
I bet you with the exception of cargo haulers, most people's dominate use of their car is to get to and from work every day. I bet you most people drive less than 100 miles a day.
I believe we are on the cusp of a new era. We will be buying "commuter" vehicles to go to and from work. These will be basically highway-rated golf carts, capable of driving us to and from work and stopping by to pick up the kids at school and some milk on the way home - basically 100 miles a day. You'll recharge it every night. And they will be cheap - less than $15K, possibly less than $10K. Probably made in China.
We will still have our gasoline-burning pick-up trucks and minivans for the weekend excursions. But during the week, when most of us drive less than 100 miles a day, we'll have our electric golf carts.
Look, I don't give a wet fart how green the fuel that makes my car goes is. The simple fact is, the mere act of existing has negative consequences on something. So I don't really care if my car is "green" or not.
All I want is the cheapest fuel possible. At the very least, I don't want to be tied to a single source for the fuel. Especially the Middle East.
The day oil ceases to be a major fuel source is the day the whole Middle East dries up like a popcorn fart and blows away in the wind of irrelevance.
I hope to not have to buy a car again for another five years. When the time comes, though, I won't consider any car that doesn't get at least 60 MPG. Hopefully it will be electric instead. Give me a SmartCar that is pluggable, does 100 miles at 70 MPH between overnight charges, and I'm there.
I don't know. I think I would prefer to know the truth. That way, if, say, I am deciding whether or not to hire someone, I can bet on the guy without the checkered past instead of the guy with one, rather than betting on whether or not he is now "well-adjusted".
In any case, it's a moot point. We are rapidly approaching the time where there will be no privacy, if we are not already there. Basically if someone wants to spend enough time and money looking at your past, they will find anything there is to find.
This sucks. I have been completely satisfied with my Vonage service. It is far superior to any other phone service I have ever had. The ability to have my voicemails delivered as email has been fantastic. The price has been fantastic. The Quality of Service has been fantastic.
I guess I have a hard time getting worked up about this issue of people registering typo-close domain names.
Look, if you want to take a guess at a domain name and type it into your address bar in your browser, feel free. Maybe you'll get lucky and hit the real site, maybe you won't. I admit it, sometimes I don't bother with Google and I take a guess and just type in a domain.
But if you REALLY want to be sure you're hitting the REAL web site of interest, just Google it! 99% of the time the site you really were after is going to be right there at the top of the list.
If you guess-type in domain names, don't be surprised when you get a random web site.
>I don't think video realism is really up to par yet with little kids aiming guns at other little kids.
No, it isn't. Yet.
And even if you/had/ smeared each other with ketchup, your playing "cops and robbers" or whatever with your toy guns/still/ would have been a far cry from a lifelike audio-video recording of someone getting shot for real, which is where video games are heading.
Think of it this way - do you let your children watch rated R hack-n-slash horror films? Would you let them play a computer game that was equally realistic?
Today, I agree with you. I think I'd play any of my games with my child.
But would you play them with your child if they were indistinguishable from a video recording of the event depicted? If you could bash someone's head in with a crowbar, or shoot them in the stomach at close range with a shotgun with lifelike realism would you still play the game with your child, explaining all the while that it's just a "puppet"?
That's the point. The OP was suggesting that graphics don't really matter, and I contend that they do, or at least, they will very soon. As the technology advances that permits extremely realistic graphic portrayals of violence, I think we are going to all have to re-think which games we will allow our children to play.
>I don't know if better graphics make the games more detrimental to your children's mental health.
I think they do.
Let's face it, all simulation-type games are just that - SIMULATIONS. When the technology was prohibitive, the simulations were necessarily crude. But as technology progresses, the simulations are going to become more and more realistic.
I think it is pretty much established that exposure to sensory stimuli can cause desensitizing to those stimuli.
The more realistic the simulation of the sensory stimuli of, say, graphic murder, becomes, the more risk there will be of reducing sensitivity to/real/ sensory stimuli of graphic murder.
In summary, it is not just the/concept/ of the simulation that is important to consider, but the/fidelity/ of the simulation. The more realistic the simulation, the more concerned we should be about the impact on the impressionable.
As an engineer who has dealt with rapid prototyping technologies for over 15 years, I have seen a lot of these technologies evolve.
Until the transporter is invented, I don't think we are in any danger of seeing things copied in the real world on the scale that we see them copied in the digital world. The fact is, there are still severe limitations on the mediums that rapid prototype items can be produced from, and they are still quite costly to have made. Even a small part, say the size of a disk drive, can cost a couple of hundred dollars for a physical mockup.
Slashdot Mirror
When my child is old enough to use the computer, my instructions will be simple:
You may use this computer in any manner you like. There will be no attempts to block or filter content.
But I will be monitoring everything you do with it.
While "spying on your children" is not a replacement for good parenting, what's wrong with spying on your children in /addition/ to good parenting?
/not/ use technology to help me keep tabs on what my child is doing? It's called being /involved/, and I consider that /good/ parenting.
It's my computer, my internet, and my house. I have every right to know what my child is doing on my computer, using my internet, in my house.
Why
>There is no link between the number of electric cars on the road and an increased desire for a clean grid.
p hp
You are right. But there will be an increased focus on electrical generation techniques, and there is you chance to improve how that is done, both in terms of cost and the environment.
The bottom line is, the entire infrastructure has to be replaced with something that doesn't depend on fossil fuels, both the electricity generation infrastructure and the personal transportation infrastructure.
I'm willing to start with cars, because 1) I have some measure of control over that, 2) I can do it now, and 3) it will have to be done eventually anyway. If you want to wait around for the top to get switched over to something else before worrying about your car, be my guest. Myself, my next car buying decision is going to be based only on the cost to run it. If that is electricity, then that is what it will be. I'm strongly considering this one: http://www.hybridtechnologies.com/smartcar_order.
>We do? How?
We all pay through our health that is affected by pollution. We pay by the loss of natural environments and habitats that we can no longer enjoy. We also pay through taxation used for cleaning up environmental messes. There are numerous ways in which we all collectively pay for crapping where we live.
You just want an extra punishment.
>There is however a ton of things to invent for a clean grid.
Not really. We've got viable solutions for nuclear, solar, and wind power right now. They just haven't been economically feasible. That is about to change with the price of gasoline going where it is going.
>We're decades away from a clean grid.
So? We're decades away from everyone having electric cars, too.
>We've had plug in pure electric cars for decades.
But there hasn't been financial incentive to make them acceptable. That is changing with the price of gasoline going through the roof. I can tell you right now my next car purchase will be 100% driven by fuel economy. I don't care if it runs on gasoline or horse manure, but it's going to be equivalent to a 100MPG car today in terms of cost to operate.
>If we have electric cars and a dirty grid there's no gain.
The thing is, if we have electric cars the entire focus now goes to electricity generation plants. THEN you can focus on how to do that in a green, or at least economic fashion. And market forces are going to drive that in a big way. When the energy needs of all gasoline burning cars are converted to electricity, they are going to have to add electrical generation capacity in a big way. My guess is the only viable way to satisfy that need is through nuclear power. Fine by me.
>If we have a clean grid and petro cars there is a gain.
Without something to drive the demand for electricity, there aren't going to be any improvements to the grid, green or otherwise, for a long time. Electric cars will increase demand for electricity, and legislation can determine how those new centralized facilities will operate.
>You are completely correct. I want grid then car.
Without the car, nothing is going to change on the grid. Or rather, change will come much more slowly because there will be not nearly as dramatic an increase in demand. And then, once you do have a green grid, then you'll have to tackle all the cars anyway!
No, the cars are the catalyst to getting our personal transportation needs satisfied by electricity. Electric cars in the short term may do nothing for the environment. But the increased electrical demand is going to require new ways of generating electricity, and there is your opportunity to go green. Frankly I don't care if it's green, I just want cheap, and I don't want the funding going to the Middle East.
>Electric cars aren't doing anything _now_.
Except increasing the demand for and focus on electricity generation.
>Until we have a clean grid petrol cars and electric cars are both fossil fuel based.
But electric cars will hasten the move to more efficient grids, whereas efficient grids may or may not hasten the move to electric cars.
But we all pay for pollution already. You're saying we need to pay $12 a gallon in addition to paying the costs for pollution we already pay?
Yes, but it's all about small steps, guy.
/today/, we can worry about improving the power plants as we go.
If we work slowly on getting all-electric cars, something that is technologically feasible
I see it as a much much easier hurdle to overcome - you don't have to invent anything - all the technology necessary to make it happen is available right now.
You want a car that is powered by something that doesn't exist today.
Absolutely resources should be directed at cleaner sources of electricity, and no doubt they will be. But we need to do something about the cars _now_. There is no need to wait until the centralized electrical generation facilities are all green before getting rid of ungreen "applicances" that use electricity in favor of fossil fuels.
>Because you got a free ride, and now you have to pay for it. See, burning fuel results in externalities that, right now, you aren't paying for.
Such as?
Steve
I see comments like YOURS and /I/ don't understand them at all.
Look, everyone understands that there are also problems with a centralized power distribution system.
It's just obvious that is going to be a WHOLE lot easier to work on maximizing the efficiencies of a centralized distriubtion system using currently available technologies than it is going to be trying to come up with a new technology for decentralized power generation.
From what I've been reading lately hybrids aren't all they are cracked up to be, especially if you do a lot of long-distance driving with little stop-and-go to make use of regenerative braking. They still generate all their electricity from fossil fuel.
Pure electric cars ARE different from a standard car.
Power plants can be made to run off of nuclear, solar, or wind.
I get so sick of the argument that says, "Well, all you are doing is moving where the fossil fuels are burned". Sure - today.
But which do you think has a greater chance of happening any time soon? Coming up with cars that don't burn fossil fuels or coming up with power plants that don't burn fossil fuels?
The battle for electricity is 75% won. The distribution system is in place. The technology is over 100 years old. All you have to do is change the method of electricity generation and the centralized generation facilities.
I refuse to settle for less.
The answer is not to be satisfied with gas being at least $12 a gallon, nor living like a hermit. The answer is to continue to grow and evolve and enjoy ever-higher qualities of life while coming up with new and better ways to sustain it.
It's called progress.
>And the source of the energy to power your car when you plug it in at night?
/centralized/ power generation system than we do replacing the entire transportation system with more efficient power generation systems.
>Oil, or worse, coal, though possibly nuclear...
Ah that old saw.
Look, the current electrical system ain't perfect. But we have a WHOLE lot more chance of coming up with a more efficient
Nuclear. Solar. Wind. There are technologies in place TODAY that can satisfy the demand for electricity. Let's use it and move forward.
>It needs to go at least 300 miles or else it's irrelevant for anything but commuting, and I gave up on commuting by car a long time ago.
I bet you with the exception of cargo haulers, most people's dominate use of their car is to get to and from work every day. I bet you most people drive less than 100 miles a day.
I believe we are on the cusp of a new era. We will be buying "commuter" vehicles to go to and from work. These will be basically highway-rated golf carts, capable of driving us to and from work and stopping by to pick up the kids at school and some milk on the way home - basically 100 miles a day. You'll recharge it every night. And they will be cheap - less than $15K, possibly less than $10K. Probably made in China.
We will still have our gasoline-burning pick-up trucks and minivans for the weekend excursions. But during the week, when most of us drive less than 100 miles a day, we'll have our electric golf carts.
>I might even pay a little MORE because it gets OPEC's huge cock out of my ass.
:)
I wish I could give you all my mod points for life.
Look, I don't give a wet fart how green the fuel that makes my car goes is. The simple fact is, the mere act of existing has negative consequences on something. So I don't really care if my car is "green" or not.
All I want is the cheapest fuel possible. At the very least, I don't want to be tied to a single source for the fuel. Especially the Middle East.
The day oil ceases to be a major fuel source is the day the whole Middle East dries up like a popcorn fart and blows away in the wind of irrelevance.
I hope to not have to buy a car again for another five years. When the time comes, though, I won't consider any car that doesn't get at least 60 MPG. Hopefully it will be electric instead. Give me a SmartCar that is pluggable, does 100 miles at 70 MPH between overnight charges, and I'm there.
All of the spam I get is embedded-image spam.
I don't get any legitimate emails that have embedded images in them.
I would like to make Outlook move emails with embedded images directly into a junk folder.
How do I do this?
Thanks,
I don't know. I think I would prefer to know the truth. That way, if, say, I am deciding whether or not to hire someone, I can bet on the guy without the checkered past instead of the guy with one, rather than betting on whether or not he is now "well-adjusted".
In any case, it's a moot point. We are rapidly approaching the time where there will be no privacy, if we are not already there. Basically if someone wants to spend enough time and money looking at your past, they will find anything there is to find.
Accurate data is truth. Inaccurate data can be changed, or at least rebutted. Why forget truth?
This sucks. I have been completely satisfied with my Vonage service. It is far superior to any other phone service I have ever had. The ability to have my voicemails delivered as email has been fantastic. The price has been fantastic. The Quality of Service has been fantastic.
And now it's all going away.
That sucks.
I guess I have a hard time getting worked up about this issue of people registering typo-close domain names.
Look, if you want to take a guess at a domain name and type it into your address bar in your browser, feel free. Maybe you'll get lucky and hit the real site, maybe you won't. I admit it, sometimes I don't bother with Google and I take a guess and just type in a domain.
But if you REALLY want to be sure you're hitting the REAL web site of interest, just Google it! 99% of the time the site you really were after is going to be right there at the top of the list.
If you guess-type in domain names, don't be surprised when you get a random web site.
What they really need to do is just mount these things to children. THEY produce PLENTY of movement. :)
Steve
1997 vintage RCA CRT TV.
>I don't think video realism is really up to par yet with little kids aiming guns at other little kids.
/had/ smeared each other with ketchup, your playing "cops and robbers" or whatever with your toy guns /still/ would have been a far cry from a lifelike audio-video recording of someone getting shot for real, which is where video games are heading.
No, it isn't. Yet.
And even if you
Think of it this way - do you let your children watch rated R hack-n-slash horror films? Would you let them play a computer game that was equally realistic?
Today, I agree with you. I think I'd play any of my games with my child.
But would you play them with your child if they were indistinguishable from a video recording of the event depicted? If you could bash someone's head in with a crowbar, or shoot them in the stomach at close range with a shotgun with lifelike realism would you still play the game with your child, explaining all the while that it's just a "puppet"?
That's the point. The OP was suggesting that graphics don't really matter, and I contend that they do, or at least, they will very soon. As the technology advances that permits extremely realistic graphic portrayals of violence, I think we are going to all have to re-think which games we will allow our children to play.
>I don't know if better graphics make the games more detrimental to your children's mental health.
/real/ sensory stimuli of graphic murder.
/concept/ of the simulation that is important to consider, but the /fidelity/ of the simulation. The more realistic the simulation, the more concerned we should be about the impact on the impressionable.
I think they do.
Let's face it, all simulation-type games are just that - SIMULATIONS. When the technology was prohibitive, the simulations were necessarily crude. But as technology progresses, the simulations are going to become more and more realistic.
I think it is pretty much established that exposure to sensory stimuli can cause desensitizing to those stimuli.
The more realistic the simulation of the sensory stimuli of, say, graphic murder, becomes, the more risk there will be of reducing sensitivity to
In summary, it is not just the
Steve
As an engineer who has dealt with rapid prototyping technologies for over 15 years, I have seen a lot of these technologies evolve.
Until the transporter is invented, I don't think we are in any danger of seeing things copied in the real world on the scale that we see them copied in the digital world. The fact is, there are still severe limitations on the mediums that rapid prototype items can be produced from, and they are still quite costly to have made. Even a small part, say the size of a disk drive, can cost a couple of hundred dollars for a physical mockup.