This has an interesting mirror in the Xerox Corporation. The invented the "xerographic" copier machine which was superior to other copying methods at the time like the mimeograph. Their first machine, the Model A had lots of problems and they initially lost money. But it was still a superior technology, and they learned more from releasing a product than they would by staying in the lab. Their subsequent products improved and they rapidly grew, were highly profitable, and basically developed a monopoly position because nobody could compete with them at that early stage. They created the xerographic copier market by inventing, perfecting, and selling the first commercial copier of this type.
Then they invented and reduced to practice many of the underpinnings of personal computing at their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). But they had grown fat with bureaucracy and didn't want to enter an unestablished market because they couldn't forecast high revenues since there was no market for personal computing at the time and hence no revenue. They had forgotten their roots as a technology disruptor and market creator!
GM had an opportunity to develop an early lead in EV's and establish themselves as a market leader and disruptor. Whether they really could have done it at the time is unsure - but we'll never know for sure because they weren't committed to the idea.
That's not entirely true. It started out as an empirical observation about the pace of complexity increase of integrated circuits, but then it also became a roadmap, once the "simple" scaling was panned out, for development so that the new technologies and innovations needed to keep the pace were ready in time for a new node's debut.
This is the record efficiency obtained for a SILICON solar cell, and while the title may be slightly misleading by not clarifying the summary and articles are discussing Silicon cells. This is absolutely a record, and it is of great interest and importance since such a cell would be expected to give a lower cost per watt than multijunction cells.
What they are upset about is poorly done science that's driven by biased politics and ideology instead of the objective and impartial scientific method. Climate "science" is a good example of this, with data that's "corrected"/"massaged" and predictions that prove to be wildly inaccurate, decade after decade. Republicans don't like "science" like that. They have much higher standards than what we've seen from leftist scientists. They demand fact-based science, not politically driven "science".
Anybody who knows anything about metrology (the science of measurement) knows that corrections are absolutely routine, and frequently essential, to get meaning from raw measurement data. To suggest that data should be totally uncorrected is potentially as wrong as applying the wrong correction.
In fact temperature is one that I have particular experience with. If you want to know the temperature inside a device on a hot plate, you can just take the temperature at the hotplate surface, right? Wrong! Because of the thermal resistance due to the interface to the hotplate, and inside the device, and convection to surrounding air, you actually need to apply "correction" to the data if you want it to be meaningful. Also if the hot plate is not properly calibrated (corrected) the internal thermocouple might not even represent the temperature at the hotplate surface due to thermal resistances.
I've not seen anything credible to suggest that climate researchers are improperly applying corrections. But if you have credible sources to cite, please do.
Actually the US Govt through NASA did pay for specific design and development work that was specific to the NASA resupply mission, though SpaceX did the core launch vehicle entirely on their own I believe.
But this is the way NASA structured the program and put it out to bid. If NASA had wanted to purchase resupply flights but provide no development money then SpaceX could have bid on that but it would be a very different program, and they would have had to end up charging more overall to cover up-front development, risk, and financing costs.
I really didn't know if this was real or made up. I thought even though Donald has been known to wander off topic pretty impressively this one is just so incredibly bad that it has to be a well-written parody.
If you even read the summary you see that online ad revenue is a pretty small portion of their revenue, just $0.2B out of $1.6B, so your unsubstantiated assertion that they are falsifying subscribers or gifting subscriptions to up their ad revenue doesn't even make a lot of sense since it's a kind of small part of their revenue.
You've also credited t_d with finding that 50% of the click rates come from China, which is blocked. I assume you mean ad click rates, the metric that is being replaced more by ad impressions as a metric for ad value. But even if what you say is even true, people in China do know how to get around the firewall, so it's not a bad thing if Chinese people read the NYT.
What do you mean by "NASA spec pressure vessels"? Air pressure at sea level is only 14.7 psi, which is what's needed to hold a complete vacuum, and Hyperloop doesn't need a perfect clean vacuum.
I don't agree or disagree with your characterization of Hyperloop's true costs and risks because I'm not familiar enough with technical details, and because of that I'm curious what your basis is for your assertions.
You're using the "analysis by analogy" approach, where you say that this is the largest vacuum vessel ever built, and that there are some unspecified safety costs, and that together these necessitate quantum leap of vacuum or structurual technology to solve. Vacuum pumps and structural tech currently seem pretty well developed so counting on vast improvements here seems risky.
Do you mean improvements are needed to the vacuum pumps, or construction of tubes that can sustain a shallow vacuum? And what specifically is deficient in current structural technology?
Musk has often cautioned that a first principals analysis is much better than the analogy-based approach, which is largely what led him to his work with both Tesla and SpaceX. What is inherently hard about creating large vacuum vessels? These are not ultra high vacuum which requires careful selection of materials, cleaning, baking, multiple stages of vacuum pumps, etc. In fact Hyperloop depends on a rarefied atmosphere for lift, not a full vacuum. The tech, as Musk has stated, is largely similar to pipeline construction, i.e. a steel tube built in sections which are welded together by a robotic welder.
I don't think it's settled either way, but it's risky to make such confident assertions unless you have genuine experience in these fields, which you haven't stated one way or another.
California has a pretty good water infrastructure to do just that... but there is a finite pipeline and pumping capacity which is limited by the fact that this infrastructure is expensive to build and run. Capacity needs to be way overbuilt to handle the occasional windfall from winter storms - and not every reservoir is going to get such a windfall so pipeline and pumping capacity has to be built at each reservoir to handle these events.
It's possible to do, just expensive. But it may be a direction that California needs to move in to improve their water security.
Yes, this is the case because you have tanks holding the liquids, and these are flowed through a cell to extract the energy. The volume of the tank sets the amount of energy stored, and the surface area of the cell where charging/discharging takes place sets the power.
This is all true, but lower frequencies are divided more finely into channels because they are in more demand, and you may not be able to combine many channels together depending on demand. The mm-wave and sub-mm-wave frequencies there is much more bandwidth available, so channels can be larger. 300 GHz is not super useful right now because it is incredibly expensive to get enough transmit power to get a useful range, but that's why these technology demonstrators are done to work on technology for generating the super high datarate modulated signals, and preliminary Tx/Rx technology which has enough bandwidth to support the signal.
This is a pretty commonly accepted definition of "terahertz", also called sub-mm-wave which runs from 0.3-3 THz. The atmospheric loss keeps increasing with frequency, and the expense of getting a given transmitter power also increases, so there's really no point in pushing the frequency further into the THz band at the moment.
Why would you want assimilation? The very word you use, "assimilation", can be interpreted in a somewhat chilling way, suggesting that any immigrant must give up their culture and conform to some cultural norm that you choose. And which cultural norm exactly would you pick? Even if you restrict yourself to white European-descended Americans there is still a huge variation in the culture from the West Coast, to Midwest, to South, to the East Coast, New England, and more. America is a diverse country, and that diversity gives it strength, and you are foolish if you think that there even is a single American culture for immigrants to be assimilated into.
Also you talk about "losing your culture"... nobody is taking your culture away from you. Immigrants may bring their own culture, but your culture is still here too. And the cultures do meld and transform over time, but not instantly of course.
Where have you seen Musk sucking up to Trump? He criticized him before the election, and has criticized some of his actions after especially the travel ban.
From reading his Tweets it seems clear that Musk just wants to do the right thing, working with the administration to push for positive changes, rather than picketing in the street. You may disagree about the best way to do the right thing.
It's disturbing how confidently you seem to state your opinions while knowing nothing of the subject. I've known this woman for years and have watched her loosen up and become more liberal in her time in America. Have you ever met anybody from one of these countries? I work with people from all over the world and have met several Iranians, most of whom are very hard working and friendly people. One started a small business that now employs several Americans.
Your education about the Muslim religion is severely lacking. It's a cult to the same extent that Christianity is a cult. I don't understand the appeal of any organized religion, since it makes as much logical sense to me as astrology, but I don't begrudge people their belief so long as they don't try to impose their beliefs on me or give their beliefs the force of law.
Fun fact - the World Trade Center terrorists did not hail from any of the 6 counties that our President has enacted a travel ban on, they hailed primarily from Saudi Arabia, our ally.
In the meanwhile you need to get out of your bubble and meet some Muslim people. You sound like you don't have a very diverse upbringing, well guess what there's a lot of diversity in America if you live and work in urban areas or technical fields. I have a colleague who is Muslim. She has a PhD in a technical field and wants to stay in the USA. She's the kind of person America should want to hang onto and not drive away. Yet now her parents in her home country likely won't be able to get a visa to visit her here, and she has no idea if the greencard she is in the application process for is still a possibly in this new scaremongering era of Trump.
Calling Aluminum Oxynitride, or Aluminum Oxide "transparent aluminum" is like calling glass or quartz "transparent silicon" just because its chemical makeup is silicon dioxide. Some people do like to call things "transparent aluminum" just because it sounds futuristic, even though it makes no sense to do so.
The compounds Aluminum Oxide/Oxynitride share essentially no mechanical, chemical, optical, or electrical properties with elemental aluminum, so calling it "transparent aluminum" is, well.... wrong. The properties can also change quite a bit depending on the structure, e.g. amorphous, poly-crystalline, and the various crystal phases, so the same chemical compound can have very different properties in the same way that quartz and glass are different, or diamond and graphite are different.
Names matter because they describe what is being named. "Transparent aluminum" is a bad name since it is being used to refer to a wide range of aluminum-containing compounds whose properties have zero no resemblance to aluminum, so the name is implying a relationship that is incorrect.
Trump would have campaigned differently if it was a popular vote election... but obviously Clinton would have changed her strategy too. The assumption that Trump would have won a popular vote election is at best unsupported and at worst delusional. Both candidates focused on swing states since that's how you win an electoral college election. The simple fact is that urban people favored Clinton, and there's a lot of urban people, and Clinton most likely would have won a popular vote election.
The space program was an early customer of integrated circuits, along with military customers, but IC's would have been developed with or without NASA and the DoD, just a little slower perhaps. This is characteristic of such organizations - NASA and DoD have actual applications for advanced technology and have big budgets are willing to spend big bucks to develop and then purchase state of the art technology when there is an advantage to doing so.
But the merits of NASA are not really in the follow-on technologies developed. If you spend billions per year on R&D you'll get some technology out no matter what.
The true benefit of space exploration is just that - the space exploration. Finding out about our planet, our solar system, the Universe, and where we came from and where we fit in as a species. Setting foot on the moon. Traveling to Mars in the next decade or two (probably). Considering establishing civilization on Mars. These are the true benefits of space exploration, the rest is just icing on the cake.
It's not really intended to be carried around, it's intended to be used in embedded applications. Your example of putting one inside a TV is one example, it could certainly be the brains behind a media center.
You're comparing not even a decade of Tesla versus over a hundred years of gasoline-powered cars. This comparison is wholly disingenuous.
No, it isn't. ICE cars have 90 vehicle fires per billion miles driven. EV's cumulatively have over 1 billion miles driven, and there is enough statistical significance to say that EV's, including Teslas, have a lower vehicle fire rate.
Without this, you simply couldn't give a laptop the power draw it needed (just a few years ago you needed ~90w average for a laptop, at lithium-ion's nominal 3.7V that's almost 30 amps of current. Non-parallel Li-ion packs can't handle that kind of load. 1C is the best you can really hope for safety in li-ion, which means a 2400 mAh li-ion cell can only be ideally charged and discharged at 2.4A.
The amount of power that can be drawn from a pack doesn't depend on the series/parallel arrangement of the cells. If you put two cells in parallel the voltage is the same but allowable current doubles, so power doubles. With two cells in series the voltage doubles while current stays the same, so power still doubles. Nevertheless it is generally more practical to have a combination of series and parallel arrangement because the ultimate power consuming electronics in the laptop run off of relatively low voltages, so putting the cells all in series would reduce the efficiency of the buck converter that downconverts the voltage, and necessitate use of higher voltage components.
If you care so much about the per capita power of your vote, why do you want to dilute it from 1 in 40 million to 1 in 350 million?
That's not how you compare per capita voting power. It's well known that the most populous states have less voting power per capita, because you need to compare number of voters to number of electoral votes.
Yes I have about a 1 in ~30 million influence on my state's electoral vote in the current system (well closer to 1 in ~10 million based on voter eligibility and turnout), but 10 million votes from my state are worth less than 10 million votes from the smallest states in the union, because the smaller states get more electoral votes for the same number of voters.
I'm also not saying that swing states are the smallest states, just that the swing states you listed collectively represent just 25% of the population, a hair less than the combined totals of CA, TX, and NY, and yet the "swing" quarter of the country in reality matters more to the election than the biggest states (excepting Florida) and the smallest states.
I'm not at all saying this election was illegitimate. And I understand the historical reasons for why we have the system that we do, and I understand arguments for keeping it the current way. But there are also valid arguments to change it. I don't think there's a 100% right or wrong answer incidentally, it just comes down to opinion about how you think the country should be run. Personally I have two main reasons: (1) I think the system made more sense when the Constitution was ratified than it does today, with the federal government much more powerful today the reason for splitting things along state lines makes less sense, and (2) I live in a large state and am unhappy that my vote proportionally counts for less.
I don't see how Trump winning the popular vote of non-CA voters is interesting trivia, California is 12% of the nation's population and swings pretty Democratic so it's exactly what you would expect. It would be far more interesting if a Democratic candidate won the popular vote without California voters.
Trump losing the popular vote is not trivia - it shows that Trump has become the leader of a deeply divided nation and does not have the support of a plurality, let alone majority, of the electorate.
Yes, we all know that Trump won more states and more electoral votes, but we also know that he lost on the votes of the American people with a 2% loss compared to the more popular candidate. Trump claimed in his victory speech to want to be a President for all Americans, but so far he has taken no action to reach out to the millions who voted for his opponent.
You make that point the California has ~20x more electoral votes than Wyoming and from that seem to conclude that a California voter is more powerful than a Wyoming voter. This is a confusing stance because to me because California in the 2016 election had ~50x as many voters as the state of Wyoming. This clearly shows that the average California voter wields far less power than the average Wyoming voter. Why do we giving Wyoming voters more power per capita simply because the number of voters that fall into their state lines is smaller?
Giving the power of the President these days, and the fact that populous states tend to subsidize the less populous states at the federal level, I personally think that voting power should be distributed solely based on population rather than on a combination of population and state lines. Right now Presidents must cater to swing states in their campaigns, some of which are small states. If we move to a popular vote they would cater to populous states. I'm okay with that because then at least the Presidential candidates would be catering to a majority of Americans rather than a minority. If you have to pick between tyranny of the minority and majority, I think majority is better.
Slashdot Mirror
This has an interesting mirror in the Xerox Corporation. The invented the "xerographic" copier machine which was superior to other copying methods at the time like the mimeograph. Their first machine, the Model A had lots of problems and they initially lost money. But it was still a superior technology, and they learned more from releasing a product than they would by staying in the lab. Their subsequent products improved and they rapidly grew, were highly profitable, and basically developed a monopoly position because nobody could compete with them at that early stage. They created the xerographic copier market by inventing, perfecting, and selling the first commercial copier of this type.
Then they invented and reduced to practice many of the underpinnings of personal computing at their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). But they had grown fat with bureaucracy and didn't want to enter an unestablished market because they couldn't forecast high revenues since there was no market for personal computing at the time and hence no revenue. They had forgotten their roots as a technology disruptor and market creator!
GM had an opportunity to develop an early lead in EV's and establish themselves as a market leader and disruptor. Whether they really could have done it at the time is unsure - but we'll never know for sure because they weren't committed to the idea.
That's not entirely true. It started out as an empirical observation about the pace of complexity increase of integrated circuits, but then it also became a roadmap, once the "simple" scaling was panned out, for development so that the new technologies and innovations needed to keep the pace were ready in time for a new node's debut.
This is the record efficiency obtained for a SILICON solar cell, and while the title may be slightly misleading by not clarifying the summary and articles are discussing Silicon cells. This is absolutely a record, and it is of great interest and importance since such a cell would be expected to give a lower cost per watt than multijunction cells.
Anybody who knows anything about metrology (the science of measurement) knows that corrections are absolutely routine, and frequently essential, to get meaning from raw measurement data. To suggest that data should be totally uncorrected is potentially as wrong as applying the wrong correction.
In fact temperature is one that I have particular experience with. If you want to know the temperature inside a device on a hot plate, you can just take the temperature at the hotplate surface, right? Wrong! Because of the thermal resistance due to the interface to the hotplate, and inside the device, and convection to surrounding air, you actually need to apply "correction" to the data if you want it to be meaningful. Also if the hot plate is not properly calibrated (corrected) the internal thermocouple might not even represent the temperature at the hotplate surface due to thermal resistances.
I've not seen anything credible to suggest that climate researchers are improperly applying corrections. But if you have credible sources to cite, please do.
Actually the US Govt through NASA did pay for specific design and development work that was specific to the NASA resupply mission, though SpaceX did the core launch vehicle entirely on their own I believe.
But this is the way NASA structured the program and put it out to bid. If NASA had wanted to purchase resupply flights but provide no development money then SpaceX could have bid on that but it would be a very different program, and they would have had to end up charging more overall to cover up-front development, risk, and financing costs.
I really didn't know if this was real or made up. I thought even though Donald has been known to wander off topic pretty impressively this one is just so incredibly bad that it has to be a well-written parody.
So I Googled it. Unfortunately it's real....
If you even read the summary you see that online ad revenue is a pretty small portion of their revenue, just $0.2B out of $1.6B, so your unsubstantiated assertion that they are falsifying subscribers or gifting subscriptions to up their ad revenue doesn't even make a lot of sense since it's a kind of small part of their revenue.
You've also credited t_d with finding that 50% of the click rates come from China, which is blocked. I assume you mean ad click rates, the metric that is being replaced more by ad impressions as a metric for ad value. But even if what you say is even true, people in China do know how to get around the firewall, so it's not a bad thing if Chinese people read the NYT.
What do you mean by "NASA spec pressure vessels"? Air pressure at sea level is only 14.7 psi, which is what's needed to hold a complete vacuum, and Hyperloop doesn't need a perfect clean vacuum.
I don't agree or disagree with your characterization of Hyperloop's true costs and risks because I'm not familiar enough with technical details, and because of that I'm curious what your basis is for your assertions.
You're using the "analysis by analogy" approach, where you say that this is the largest vacuum vessel ever built, and that there are some unspecified safety costs, and that together these necessitate quantum leap of vacuum or structurual technology to solve. Vacuum pumps and structural tech currently seem pretty well developed so counting on vast improvements here seems risky.
Do you mean improvements are needed to the vacuum pumps, or construction of tubes that can sustain a shallow vacuum? And what specifically is deficient in current structural technology?
Musk has often cautioned that a first principals analysis is much better than the analogy-based approach, which is largely what led him to his work with both Tesla and SpaceX. What is inherently hard about creating large vacuum vessels? These are not ultra high vacuum which requires careful selection of materials, cleaning, baking, multiple stages of vacuum pumps, etc. In fact Hyperloop depends on a rarefied atmosphere for lift, not a full vacuum. The tech, as Musk has stated, is largely similar to pipeline construction, i.e. a steel tube built in sections which are welded together by a robotic welder.
I don't think it's settled either way, but it's risky to make such confident assertions unless you have genuine experience in these fields, which you haven't stated one way or another.
California has a pretty good water infrastructure to do just that... but there is a finite pipeline and pumping capacity which is limited by the fact that this infrastructure is expensive to build and run. Capacity needs to be way overbuilt to handle the occasional windfall from winter storms - and not every reservoir is going to get such a windfall so pipeline and pumping capacity has to be built at each reservoir to handle these events.
It's possible to do, just expensive. But it may be a direction that California needs to move in to improve their water security.
Yes, this is the case because you have tanks holding the liquids, and these are flowed through a cell to extract the energy. The volume of the tank sets the amount of energy stored, and the surface area of the cell where charging/discharging takes place sets the power.
This is all true, but lower frequencies are divided more finely into channels because they are in more demand, and you may not be able to combine many channels together depending on demand. The mm-wave and sub-mm-wave frequencies there is much more bandwidth available, so channels can be larger. 300 GHz is not super useful right now because it is incredibly expensive to get enough transmit power to get a useful range, but that's why these technology demonstrators are done to work on technology for generating the super high datarate modulated signals, and preliminary Tx/Rx technology which has enough bandwidth to support the signal.
This is a pretty commonly accepted definition of "terahertz", also called sub-mm-wave which runs from 0.3-3 THz. The atmospheric loss keeps increasing with frequency, and the expense of getting a given transmitter power also increases, so there's really no point in pushing the frequency further into the THz band at the moment.
Why would you want assimilation? The very word you use, "assimilation", can be interpreted in a somewhat chilling way, suggesting that any immigrant must give up their culture and conform to some cultural norm that you choose. And which cultural norm exactly would you pick? Even if you restrict yourself to white European-descended Americans there is still a huge variation in the culture from the West Coast, to Midwest, to South, to the East Coast, New England, and more. America is a diverse country, and that diversity gives it strength, and you are foolish if you think that there even is a single American culture for immigrants to be assimilated into.
Also you talk about "losing your culture"... nobody is taking your culture away from you. Immigrants may bring their own culture, but your culture is still here too. And the cultures do meld and transform over time, but not instantly of course.
Where have you seen Musk sucking up to Trump? He criticized him before the election, and has criticized some of his actions after especially the travel ban.
From reading his Tweets it seems clear that Musk just wants to do the right thing, working with the administration to push for positive changes, rather than picketing in the street. You may disagree about the best way to do the right thing.
It's disturbing how confidently you seem to state your opinions while knowing nothing of the subject. I've known this woman for years and have watched her loosen up and become more liberal in her time in America. Have you ever met anybody from one of these countries? I work with people from all over the world and have met several Iranians, most of whom are very hard working and friendly people. One started a small business that now employs several Americans.
Your education about the Muslim religion is severely lacking. It's a cult to the same extent that Christianity is a cult. I don't understand the appeal of any organized religion, since it makes as much logical sense to me as astrology, but I don't begrudge people their belief so long as they don't try to impose their beliefs on me or give their beliefs the force of law.
Fun fact - the World Trade Center terrorists did not hail from any of the 6 counties that our President has enacted a travel ban on, they hailed primarily from Saudi Arabia, our ally.
In the meanwhile you need to get out of your bubble and meet some Muslim people. You sound like you don't have a very diverse upbringing, well guess what there's a lot of diversity in America if you live and work in urban areas or technical fields. I have a colleague who is Muslim. She has a PhD in a technical field and wants to stay in the USA. She's the kind of person America should want to hang onto and not drive away. Yet now her parents in her home country likely won't be able to get a visa to visit her here, and she has no idea if the greencard she is in the application process for is still a possibly in this new scaremongering era of Trump.
Calling Aluminum Oxynitride, or Aluminum Oxide "transparent aluminum" is like calling glass or quartz "transparent silicon" just because its chemical makeup is silicon dioxide. Some people do like to call things "transparent aluminum" just because it sounds futuristic, even though it makes no sense to do so.
The compounds Aluminum Oxide/Oxynitride share essentially no mechanical, chemical, optical, or electrical properties with elemental aluminum, so calling it "transparent aluminum" is, well.... wrong. The properties can also change quite a bit depending on the structure, e.g. amorphous, poly-crystalline, and the various crystal phases, so the same chemical compound can have very different properties in the same way that quartz and glass are different, or diamond and graphite are different.
Names matter because they describe what is being named. "Transparent aluminum" is a bad name since it is being used to refer to a wide range of aluminum-containing compounds whose properties have zero no resemblance to aluminum, so the name is implying a relationship that is incorrect.
Trump would have campaigned differently if it was a popular vote election... but obviously Clinton would have changed her strategy too. The assumption that Trump would have won a popular vote election is at best unsupported and at worst delusional. Both candidates focused on swing states since that's how you win an electoral college election. The simple fact is that urban people favored Clinton, and there's a lot of urban people, and Clinton most likely would have won a popular vote election.
The space program was an early customer of integrated circuits, along with military customers, but IC's would have been developed with or without NASA and the DoD, just a little slower perhaps. This is characteristic of such organizations - NASA and DoD have actual applications for advanced technology and have big budgets are willing to spend big bucks to develop and then purchase state of the art technology when there is an advantage to doing so.
But the merits of NASA are not really in the follow-on technologies developed. If you spend billions per year on R&D you'll get some technology out no matter what.
The true benefit of space exploration is just that - the space exploration. Finding out about our planet, our solar system, the Universe, and where we came from and where we fit in as a species. Setting foot on the moon. Traveling to Mars in the next decade or two (probably). Considering establishing civilization on Mars. These are the true benefits of space exploration, the rest is just icing on the cake.
It's not really intended to be carried around, it's intended to be used in embedded applications. Your example of putting one inside a TV is one example, it could certainly be the brains behind a media center.
No, it isn't. ICE cars have 90 vehicle fires per billion miles driven. EV's cumulatively have over 1 billion miles driven, and there is enough statistical significance to say that EV's, including Teslas, have a lower vehicle fire rate.
The amount of power that can be drawn from a pack doesn't depend on the series/parallel arrangement of the cells. If you put two cells in parallel the voltage is the same but allowable current doubles, so power doubles. With two cells in series the voltage doubles while current stays the same, so power still doubles. Nevertheless it is generally more practical to have a combination of series and parallel arrangement because the ultimate power consuming electronics in the laptop run off of relatively low voltages, so putting the cells all in series would reduce the efficiency of the buck converter that downconverts the voltage, and necessitate use of higher voltage components.
That's not how you compare per capita voting power. It's well known that the most populous states have less voting power per capita, because you need to compare number of voters to number of electoral votes.
Yes I have about a 1 in ~30 million influence on my state's electoral vote in the current system (well closer to 1 in ~10 million based on voter eligibility and turnout), but 10 million votes from my state are worth less than 10 million votes from the smallest states in the union, because the smaller states get more electoral votes for the same number of voters.
I'm also not saying that swing states are the smallest states, just that the swing states you listed collectively represent just 25% of the population, a hair less than the combined totals of CA, TX, and NY, and yet the "swing" quarter of the country in reality matters more to the election than the biggest states (excepting Florida) and the smallest states.
I'm not at all saying this election was illegitimate. And I understand the historical reasons for why we have the system that we do, and I understand arguments for keeping it the current way. But there are also valid arguments to change it. I don't think there's a 100% right or wrong answer incidentally, it just comes down to opinion about how you think the country should be run. Personally I have two main reasons: (1) I think the system made more sense when the Constitution was ratified than it does today, with the federal government much more powerful today the reason for splitting things along state lines makes less sense, and (2) I live in a large state and am unhappy that my vote proportionally counts for less.
I don't see how Trump winning the popular vote of non-CA voters is interesting trivia, California is 12% of the nation's population and swings pretty Democratic so it's exactly what you would expect. It would be far more interesting if a Democratic candidate won the popular vote without California voters.
Trump losing the popular vote is not trivia - it shows that Trump has become the leader of a deeply divided nation and does not have the support of a plurality, let alone majority, of the electorate.
Yes, we all know that Trump won more states and more electoral votes, but we also know that he lost on the votes of the American people with a 2% loss compared to the more popular candidate. Trump claimed in his victory speech to want to be a President for all Americans, but so far he has taken no action to reach out to the millions who voted for his opponent.
You make that point the California has ~20x more electoral votes than Wyoming and from that seem to conclude that a California voter is more powerful than a Wyoming voter. This is a confusing stance because to me because California in the 2016 election had ~50x as many voters as the state of Wyoming. This clearly shows that the average California voter wields far less power than the average Wyoming voter. Why do we giving Wyoming voters more power per capita simply because the number of voters that fall into their state lines is smaller?
Giving the power of the President these days, and the fact that populous states tend to subsidize the less populous states at the federal level, I personally think that voting power should be distributed solely based on population rather than on a combination of population and state lines. Right now Presidents must cater to swing states in their campaigns, some of which are small states. If we move to a popular vote they would cater to populous states. I'm okay with that because then at least the Presidential candidates would be catering to a majority of Americans rather than a minority. If you have to pick between tyranny of the minority and majority, I think majority is better.