It's amazing how the Republican Party and their joculators have managed to make the word "Liberal" a term of abuse in the US. Who do you think invented laissez-faire and free market economics, back in the day when right-wingers just wanted to keep their slaves and feudal tenants from escaping to more liberal (i.e. equal and progressive) societies?
It's an impressive achievement. After all, what is the opposite of "Liberal"? Not "Conservative", but presumably "Illiberal", i.e. somebody who wants to prevent people from doing what they want. Which presumably includes the introduction of innovative business ideas which threaten the status quo.
We need a corollary to Godwin's Law: Anybody who uses "Liberal" as a term of abuse on the Internet has forfeited the argument.
Well, apart from the fact that I would never trust an American dictionary for a definition of empire, the basic definition of empire is a supranational state with the head of government being a single person or a very small oligarchy. When I last checked, the United States had a single head of government - elected, but in ancient Rome where all this comes from, dictators and emperors were elected, even if only by the Praetorians, and dictators could be elected for a fixed period.
Also, when I last checked, the US was a supranational state. As well as the continental US, there is Puerto Rico, and other islands in the Caribbean. There are the Hawaiian Islands. The UK is close to being a satrapy, with a notional independent government which, in fact, is called upon whenever the US wants to make war. Israel seems to have much the same relation to the US that it had to the Roman Empire - a turbulent state whose ruler cannot be relied on, and which one day may have to be crushed. The US is also trying to impose its government on Iraq and Afghanistan, and to establish rule over Cuba.
US politicians may not like their area of influence being called an empire. The remains of the British Empire may be a bit of a joke (Gibraltar, the Falklands and the Isle of Man). But, unless they withdraw within their borders and cease to try and rule other countries, that's what they are.
Whether the US empire is a good thing or a bad thing is, as the Chinese historian is supposed to have said of the French Revolution, too recent to decide.
The UK government buys military equipment from the US which contains software which it is not permitted to review, and indeed for which it may not be allowed the latest version. And we are supposed to be about the only real international friend the US can rely on.
And this software which we are not allowed to review may have been written by offshore programmers who will know perfectly well that they are doing the job because they are cheaper, and have absolutely no patriotic investment in the US?
I wonder how many other global empires have been brought down by the desire to make a quick buck?
Of the planets which we have extensively explored, 100% are inhabited. There is no "consistent failure to find life" anywhere else, because we have hardly even started to look. Given the size of the Universe, and the size of the Earth relative to it, your argument is equivalent to saying "I have just found three pebbles. One is red. One is green. I have looked with a microscope at a tiny part of the third pebble and it was not red. It is now dark and I cannot see any other pebbles. I conclude that there cannot be any other red pebbles on Earth."
If a significant part of the major art of Italy was put on the Net like this, it would be painfully apparent just how empty and devoid of meaning are most of the cultural productions of the 20th (and 21st so far) Centuries.
Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se' sì grande, che per mare e per terra batti l'ali...
Your product is interesting but there is a difference. The reason the cost per KW of engines over about 500KW starts to rise is that they are designed for very long life. Unlike gas engines, where when you get outside the cylinder size range of about 50-500cc things start to go downhill, Diesels scale to enormous cylinder sizes but, because the mean piston speed needs to be constant, power goes up as the 2/3 root of cylinder volume. Mass scales more closely to volume, so mass rises faster than output. However, the benefit is that the wear life of a larger cylinder is much greater, because it can tolerate larger amounts of linear wear before blowby becomes excessive.
The implications are that while the cost per installed KW of your multi-engine plant is about the same as that of a single 2MW unit (because of the additional switching and control gear) it will not have the same service life and its lifetime cost per KW is higher.
Correctly and honestly, you describe your generators as backup. But larger units in the 2MW and over range can be used as primary generators. That's the difference. As somebody else has observed elsewhere, large units can be remote controlled by electricity utilities for handling load peaks. This means that their asset utilisation can be much higher than standby generators in well designed stationary applications. The lifetime cost per KWH of a backup generator can be very high because its first cost is amortised over low running hours.
Fact is, 2MW isn't a big Diesel. It's portable power (as used in trains and boats.) That's why supply and demand is likely to vary according to major events like earthquakes and wars.
Present manual systems are not perfect but incorporate many years of experience in fraud avoidance. Short term attempts to improve matters, like the brief UK flirtation with postal votes, are too easily exploited. Politicians already complain of a disconnect between the electorate and politics, but electronic voting just makes it worse. Politics should be personal, because almost everybody can relate to the personal.
In UK elections I have tried never to vote for a candidate I have never met in person, and I do not count television or radio interviews. The results can be surprising, certainly it has meant that in my case I don't support any party, only individuals. Electronic voting, electronic means of contacting the electorate, electronic fund raising...we might have more democracy if we didn't have any of them. If the only people who vote are the ones who can be bothered to turn out (provided people are given the opportunity and not disenfranchised as seems to be happening in parts of the US) what is wrong with that? Why should a good candidate lose because an ignorant person can be persuaded by a TV ad to press one button rather than another?
Einstein's original work was a collaboration with Mrs Einstein #1. They got divorced when he won the Nobel. He got the award and she, I believe got most of the prize money in exchnage for staying out of it. Darwin cannot be understood without knowing about his grandfather, Erasmus, who gave him most of his ideas; Darwin basically found the evidence. You didn't mention Shakespeare, but he was an actor/manager whose plays were presumably polished by the actors involved (and he borrowed most of his plots anyway.)
I really believe the huge modern lie is the "Single creative individual". Why is it that when we live in a supposed democracy we still try to create sacred kings?
Yet another person determined to destroy the useful word "monetization" by depriving it of meaning. This one is really getting to me.
Monetization means to establish something as being a currency, e.g. gold, silver, perhaps grain in agricultural communities. You mean "of making a profit or getting an income from Open Source." Why can't you just say that instead of using a word that you think makes you sound like some kind of economist? When there is an exchange rate on the currency markets of lines of source code to the dollar, your comment will make sense.
When houses are built, they are supposed to be checked for proper construction by (in this country) an inspector appointed by local government. The doors and locks have certification by third party bodies (That's what the BSi and TuV certificates are for.) They are built to officially recognised common standards. (The equivalent is, of course, Open Source. You can obtain those standards, read them for yourself and decide whether in fact you trust them.)
Now suppose that your house is so built that the inspector cannot check that the correct materials have been used. The house is delivered to you pre-assembled. The manufacturer says "Safe? of course it's safe. We made it. Nobody else is allowed to know how it is done or what we used, you must take our word for it."
The same thing goes for cars. Do you not think that car systems are now multi-vendor designed and built to common standards? That the materials are independently tested and warranted? Have you noticed all those standards stickers on the glass?
For information, an AHC244 (8 way driver) with a +/-25mA output on each driven line, easily capable of switching 5V drive MOSFETS up to several amps, costs all of $0.90US in one off. I consider that cheap insurance. But then in my formative years, before mobile phones and readily available Internet, I had to design stuff for installation in remote sites. And to make sure I got the point, I had to do some of the fixing. When you have traveled from the UK to the US to do a repair under warranty, and found the problem was a failed power transistor due to somebody not bothering to buffer the driver, you get the point of cheap insurance.
Your other points, though, about adequate power supply cabling and decoupling, are spot on.
It will be interesting to see if the EU continues to stand up to Microsoft and enforces competition law. The interesting thing being that EU competition law is based on US competition law...but somehow Microsoft is treated differently in the two jurisdictions.
In the meantime, and as I have posted before, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who is going to verify that Microsoft's security solutions perform as expected? Would you, if you were a CIO, be happy believing that the same company that designed your desktop and server operating system was also responsible for providing oversight of its security? Whatever you think about lawyers, would you trust the entire judicial system to the police?
The diagram shows a simple, basic mistake in circuit design. The Vcc of the microcontroller should not ever be directly connected to the Vcc of the power bus. Adding extra capacitance to the supply is not smart, it is quite unnecessary.
The microcontroller should have a separate supply, and as the consumption of the PIC is so low this could be derived simply by passing the LED supply through a small low voltage drop diode (Schottky diode) and preferably a suitable inductor, and then decoupling it with electrolytic and ceramic capacitors (say 1000uF and 100nF) in parallel as close to the Vcc pin as possible. With this arrangement, the LED Vcc can even momentarily drop to zero and the microcontroller will just keep running.
(In fact, if you are thinking of doing this from scratch, you do not need an expensive supply at all. Rectify the output of a transformer directly to provide pulsating DC (100Hz Europe, 120Hz US.) This is the LED bus. You can do that with a 35A 50V bridge rectifier bolted to a nice big alumin(i)um strip. Then pass the output through a diode, a suitable resistor, and stabilise it with a 5.1V Zener. Assuming a peak of about 8V from your transformer, a 1A Schottky, a 10 ohm 3W wirewound resistor and a 5W 5.1V Zener will do just fine, with maybe a 1000uF electrolytic and a 100nF ceramic to stabilise the voltage at the PIC and provide enough surge capacity to drive the MOSFET gates. That way, you avoid the major disadvantage of switching power supplies, which is that they do not like rapidly varying loads.
Oh, another thing. Do not put a resistor between the PIC and the MOSFET gate. Use a driver chip to translate the current levels. Cheap insurance.
I hate to tell you this (no, I don't), but an image forming lens does not normally have light intensification properties. You can see this quite easily if you think that, for instance, an f/2 lens on a 35mm camera has a diameter of approx. 25mm, and the light entering that 25mm circle is expanded to a circle approx. 43mm-50mm diameter. If the lens is removed, the light intensity falling on a given area increases. To a first approximation, to get the same intensity with or without the lens, you would need an f/1 lens. I suggest you see how much Noctiluxes sell for, and what is their depth of field.
Like a lot of people who do not know any optics, I suspect you think that the light at the scene is somehow concentrated by the lens to form the image. It isn't; the lens doesn't suck in any extra light other than what impinges on it.
A single pixel is effectively approx f/1.
Oh yes, and you are arrogant, rude, and stupid. Perhaps you really do have a job with Microsoft.
The point is focus and low light capability
on
A Single Pixel Camera
·
· Score: 4, Informative
This is a lenseless design and therefore does not have problems of focus. The different parts of the scene should all be in focus simultaneously. There is no sensible way of schieving this with a lensed design since the better the light gathering power, the narrower the plane of focus.
The technique in use for years for infra-red cameras involves the use of a single (Peltier-cooled) pixel and a scanner, but scanners have numerous problems one of which is that there is always vibration caused by the two frequency components of the line end switching of the horizontal and vertical scans. This technique, by using pseudo-random switching, should eliminate vibration.
So the ultimate long term goal would appear to be the ability to produce 3-D images with focus throughout the entire scene, low light capability and an absence of blur due to vibration. IANAOR (I am not an optical researcher) but it seems a good line of investigation.
Given a choice between a study posted by the Lancet, a medical journal with a reputation and a long term business to protect (which has lasted for many years), and a "rejection" by any politician or government whatsoever, especially ones who only have to stay in office a year or so longer, I'm afraid I know what I would believe.
Why do we have NGOs and independent monitoring bodies? Because we know how much we can trust governments.
Theories of very hard to observe things are built up by weight of evidence. Currently study the Kuiper Belt is providing a lot of information, and as telescopes improve we find more and more about small objects in our own solar system. But if we wait till we have evidence of an object orbiting another star accreting mass from a dust cloud, that could take thousands of years.
Given what is happening in Somalia, Iraq, Congo and so forth, I suspect most Libyans would take an oppressive dictator who wants to be well thought of by the rest of the world over competing warlords any day of the week. And I doubt the British or US governments will be polling Iraqis any time soon to see if they prefer the present state of affairs (and over 600 000 deaths in a few years) over Saddam.
The UK has had over 350 years of working at democracy. The US has had over 200. We have had time to get fairly good at it and evolve civil societies. Libya hasn't.
Most of that electricity is generated using plant that is at best 40% efficient (The "65%" you sometimes see quoted includes heat recovery in cogen plants - work fine in the winter in cold places, but the heat is pure waste in the summer.) If you allow that, you also need to allow for "free" vehicle heating in winter from the waste heat.
The electric vehicle needs electric motors, which have weight. It currently needs hundreds of kilos of batteries to get a reasonable range, far more than that maybe 100kg penalty of IC over electric + 30kg of fuel. Charging and discharging batteries is far from 100% efficient - if I am lucky, with low discharge rates I get about 80% recovery output to input for my marine battery bank, which has advanced charging. So your baseline is something like 40% *.8 transmission loss *.8 charge and discharge loss *.7 electric motor efficiency = approx 18%. I will allow you a recovery on that for the percentage of electricity which is nuclear generated, so say the fossil fuel efficiency of the current electric route is around 25%.
This is approximately the same as a DI turbocharged Diesel achieves in practice. However, it requires less oil to build a Diesel engine (mostly made of iron) than the electric system plus batteries (a lot of Al, which requires huge amounts of electricity to extract, plus Li, polymers.) Then there is the additional power loss due to dragging the huge batteries around. Look at the weight of the Prius - which has only a short electric range - compared to an equivalent Toyota TDi. So, overall, the equation is still biassed in favor of the IC engine. However, this will change - in quite a long timescale, IF we build nuclear plants and plenty of wind and wave plants, IF we build the infrastructure for lots of recharging points, IF we accept that vehicles for passengers need to be smaller and lighter so we don't spend most of the generated energy moving around the vehicle rather than the occupants.
I do have a little knowledge of the field and may be the best you will get posting here. The short answer is that it depends how you define pollution. The oil industry, for instance, does not want to define carbon dioxide as pollution, but the alternative energy and nuclear lobbies do. I take that viewpoint, myself, because I have grandchildren and I don't want them to die in one of the global warming induced wars from about 2030 on.
A properly designed small direct injection Diesel powered car (VW Golf in the 100HP version, say) is probably about as good as you can get in terms of fuel plus lifetime costs (pollution arising from manufacture and disposal). Hybrids like the Prius don't seem to factor in the batteries in the equation. If it was possible to build high capacity batteries with a low manufacture and disposal energy footprint, an electric car deriving its power from nuclear, wind or wave energy would do much better. But it is not yet possible. Some forecasts suggest that significant benefits from technologies like fuel cells are probably in the 30-50 year timeframe.
So, right now, I suspect the best you can do is a VW, Toyota or Peugeot small Diesel. In any case, buying the smallest vehicle that meets your needs and renting if you need bigger is plain environmental sense. In a few years, perhaps Diesel hybrids will do better for high mileage. Electric cars - don't hold your breath.
Martian generals seeking to know the outcome of the next day's battle have to rely on chicken entrails rather than smoke plumes. Makes perfectly good sense to me.
People like this go to places like Ford Open Prison (and a "Ford MBA" isn't necessarily a career handicap I believe...) from which they go out during the day to work for charities and social organisations.
When you get phoned up by a charity soliciting money, and the person on the other end of the line is very convincing - you may be talking to a convicted fraudster or confidence trickster.
Rather than owning strategic companies, the US just has a system of pork barrel politics to keep them going (e.g. anybody making airplanes, and the amazing system under which American farmers have their surplus corn bought to make ethanol which needs as much fossil fuel to produce as it replaces, for no net gain whatsoever (source: Scientific American, this month). It is also good at protectionism when required - look at how online betting companies suddenly got hit when the US realised they were foreign owned and extracting US dollars. I bet you before long they will find a way covertly to fund GM and Ford, because after the midterms the Republicans won't want any more vote losses. Any government that wants to stay in business has to find a way to rebalance the economy, because there is no such thing as a free market. Europe just tends to be a little more blatant (transparent) about it.
Let's say "a substantial part of the ENArchy, and the national bureaucracy, speaking from personal experience over a number of years"
Good Lord, this is Slashdot. If you want academic standards of discussion and analysis, you could always try Digg!
And in case you are wondering, I think they have the right attitude. It's _your_ interpretation that suggesting that the French want to encourage the use of French and international standards, and mentioning Napoleon is xenophobia. Which suggests that you think those are bad things. Which, friend, makes you the xenophobe.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an impressive achievement. After all, what is the opposite of "Liberal"? Not "Conservative", but presumably "Illiberal", i.e. somebody who wants to prevent people from doing what they want. Which presumably includes the introduction of innovative business ideas which threaten the status quo.
We need a corollary to Godwin's Law: Anybody who uses "Liberal" as a term of abuse on the Internet has forfeited the argument.
Also, when I last checked, the US was a supranational state. As well as the continental US, there is Puerto Rico, and other islands in the Caribbean. There are the Hawaiian Islands. The UK is close to being a satrapy, with a notional independent government which, in fact, is called upon whenever the US wants to make war. Israel seems to have much the same relation to the US that it had to the Roman Empire - a turbulent state whose ruler cannot be relied on, and which one day may have to be crushed. The US is also trying to impose its government on Iraq and Afghanistan, and to establish rule over Cuba.
US politicians may not like their area of influence being called an empire. The remains of the British Empire may be a bit of a joke (Gibraltar, the Falklands and the Isle of Man). But, unless they withdraw within their borders and cease to try and rule other countries, that's what they are.
Whether the US empire is a good thing or a bad thing is, as the Chinese historian is supposed to have said of the French Revolution, too recent to decide.
And this software which we are not allowed to review may have been written by offshore programmers who will know perfectly well that they are doing the job because they are cheaper, and have absolutely no patriotic investment in the US?
I wonder how many other global empires have been brought down by the desire to make a quick buck?
Of the planets which we have extensively explored, 100% are inhabited. There is no "consistent failure to find life" anywhere else, because we have hardly even started to look. Given the size of the Universe, and the size of the Earth relative to it, your argument is equivalent to saying "I have just found three pebbles. One is red. One is green. I have looked with a microscope at a tiny part of the third pebble and it was not red. It is now dark and I cannot see any other pebbles. I conclude that there cannot be any other red pebbles on Earth."
Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se' sì grande,
che per mare e per terra batti l'ali...
Your product is interesting but there is a difference. The reason the cost per KW of engines over about 500KW starts to rise is that they are designed for very long life. Unlike gas engines, where when you get outside the cylinder size range of about 50-500cc things start to go downhill, Diesels scale to enormous cylinder sizes but, because the mean piston speed needs to be constant, power goes up as the 2/3 root of cylinder volume. Mass scales more closely to volume, so mass rises faster than output. However, the benefit is that the wear life of a larger cylinder is much greater, because it can tolerate larger amounts of linear wear before blowby becomes excessive.
The implications are that while the cost per installed KW of your multi-engine plant is about the same as that of a single 2MW unit (because of the additional switching and control gear) it will not have the same service life and its lifetime cost per KW is higher.
Correctly and honestly, you describe your generators as backup. But larger units in the 2MW and over range can be used as primary generators. That's the difference. As somebody else has observed elsewhere, large units can be remote controlled by electricity utilities for handling load peaks. This means that their asset utilisation can be much higher than standby generators in well designed stationary applications. The lifetime cost per KWH of a backup generator can be very high because its first cost is amortised over low running hours.
Fact is, 2MW isn't a big Diesel. It's portable power (as used in trains and boats.) That's why supply and demand is likely to vary according to major events like earthquakes and wars.
In UK elections I have tried never to vote for a candidate I have never met in person, and I do not count television or radio interviews. The results can be surprising, certainly it has meant that in my case I don't support any party, only individuals. Electronic voting, electronic means of contacting the electorate, electronic fund raising...we might have more democracy if we didn't have any of them. If the only people who vote are the ones who can be bothered to turn out (provided people are given the opportunity and not disenfranchised as seems to be happening in parts of the US) what is wrong with that? Why should a good candidate lose because an ignorant person can be persuaded by a TV ad to press one button rather than another?
I really believe the huge modern lie is the "Single creative individual". Why is it that when we live in a supposed democracy we still try to create sacred kings?
Monetization means to establish something as being a currency, e.g. gold, silver, perhaps grain in agricultural communities. You mean "of making a profit or getting an income from Open Source." Why can't you just say that instead of using a word that you think makes you sound like some kind of economist? When there is an exchange rate on the currency markets of lines of source code to the dollar, your comment will make sense.
Morning rant over. Back to doing documentation.
Now suppose that your house is so built that the inspector cannot check that the correct materials have been used. The house is delivered to you pre-assembled. The manufacturer says "Safe? of course it's safe. We made it. Nobody else is allowed to know how it is done or what we used, you must take our word for it."
The same thing goes for cars. Do you not think that car systems are now multi-vendor designed and built to common standards? That the materials are independently tested and warranted? Have you noticed all those standards stickers on the glass?
You are confusing design and assembly.
Your other points, though, about adequate power supply cabling and decoupling, are spot on.
In the meantime, and as I have posted before, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who is going to verify that Microsoft's security solutions perform as expected? Would you, if you were a CIO, be happy believing that the same company that designed your desktop and server operating system was also responsible for providing oversight of its security? Whatever you think about lawyers, would you trust the entire judicial system to the police?
The microcontroller should have a separate supply, and as the consumption of the PIC is so low this could be derived simply by passing the LED supply through a small low voltage drop diode (Schottky diode) and preferably a suitable inductor, and then decoupling it with electrolytic and ceramic capacitors (say 1000uF and 100nF) in parallel as close to the Vcc pin as possible. With this arrangement, the LED Vcc can even momentarily drop to zero and the microcontroller will just keep running.
(In fact, if you are thinking of doing this from scratch, you do not need an expensive supply at all. Rectify the output of a transformer directly to provide pulsating DC (100Hz Europe, 120Hz US.) This is the LED bus. You can do that with a 35A 50V bridge rectifier bolted to a nice big alumin(i)um strip. Then pass the output through a diode, a suitable resistor, and stabilise it with a 5.1V Zener. Assuming a peak of about 8V from your transformer, a 1A Schottky, a 10 ohm 3W wirewound resistor and a 5W 5.1V Zener will do just fine, with maybe a 1000uF electrolytic and a 100nF ceramic to stabilise the voltage at the PIC and provide enough surge capacity to drive the MOSFET gates. That way, you avoid the major disadvantage of switching power supplies, which is that they do not like rapidly varying loads.
Oh, another thing. Do not put a resistor between the PIC and the MOSFET gate. Use a driver chip to translate the current levels. Cheap insurance.
Like a lot of people who do not know any optics, I suspect you think that the light at the scene is somehow concentrated by the lens to form the image. It isn't; the lens doesn't suck in any extra light other than what impinges on it.
A single pixel is effectively approx f/1.
Oh yes, and you are arrogant, rude, and stupid. Perhaps you really do have a job with Microsoft.
The technique in use for years for infra-red cameras involves the use of a single (Peltier-cooled) pixel and a scanner, but scanners have numerous problems one of which is that there is always vibration caused by the two frequency components of the line end switching of the horizontal and vertical scans. This technique, by using pseudo-random switching, should eliminate vibration.
So the ultimate long term goal would appear to be the ability to produce 3-D images with focus throughout the entire scene, low light capability and an absence of blur due to vibration. IANAOR (I am not an optical researcher) but it seems a good line of investigation.
Gottes Muhlen mahlen langsam,mahlen aber trefflich klein
Ob auss Langmuth er sich seumet, bringt mit Scharff er alles ein.
Sorry to be a pedant but I am always annoyed when a source quotes a translation as the original.
Why do we have NGOs and independent monitoring bodies? Because we know how much we can trust governments.
Theories of very hard to observe things are built up by weight of evidence. Currently study the Kuiper Belt is providing a lot of information, and as telescopes improve we find more and more about small objects in our own solar system. But if we wait till we have evidence of an object orbiting another star accreting mass from a dust cloud, that could take thousands of years.
The UK has had over 350 years of working at democracy. The US has had over 200. We have had time to get fairly good at it and evolve civil societies. Libya hasn't.
The electric vehicle needs electric motors, which have weight. It currently needs hundreds of kilos of batteries to get a reasonable range, far more than that maybe 100kg penalty of IC over electric + 30kg of fuel. Charging and discharging batteries is far from 100% efficient - if I am lucky, with low discharge rates I get about 80% recovery output to input for my marine battery bank, which has advanced charging. So your baseline is something like 40% * .8 transmission loss * .8 charge and discharge loss * .7 electric motor efficiency = approx 18%. I will allow you a recovery on that for the percentage of electricity which is nuclear generated, so say the fossil fuel efficiency of the current electric route is around 25%.
This is approximately the same as a DI turbocharged Diesel achieves in practice. However, it requires less oil to build a Diesel engine (mostly made of iron) than the electric system plus batteries (a lot of Al, which requires huge amounts of electricity to extract, plus Li, polymers.) Then there is the additional power loss due to dragging the huge batteries around. Look at the weight of the Prius - which has only a short electric range - compared to an equivalent Toyota TDi. So, overall, the equation is still biassed in favor of the IC engine. However, this will change - in quite a long timescale, IF we build nuclear plants and plenty of wind and wave plants, IF we build the infrastructure for lots of recharging points, IF we accept that vehicles for passengers need to be smaller and lighter so we don't spend most of the generated energy moving around the vehicle rather than the occupants.
A properly designed small direct injection Diesel powered car (VW Golf in the 100HP version, say) is probably about as good as you can get in terms of fuel plus lifetime costs (pollution arising from manufacture and disposal). Hybrids like the Prius don't seem to factor in the batteries in the equation. If it was possible to build high capacity batteries with a low manufacture and disposal energy footprint, an electric car deriving its power from nuclear, wind or wave energy would do much better. But it is not yet possible. Some forecasts suggest that significant benefits from technologies like fuel cells are probably in the 30-50 year timeframe.
So, right now, I suspect the best you can do is a VW, Toyota or Peugeot small Diesel. In any case, buying the smallest vehicle that meets your needs and renting if you need bigger is plain environmental sense. In a few years, perhaps Diesel hybrids will do better for high mileage. Electric cars - don't hold your breath.
Martian generals seeking to know the outcome of the next day's battle have to rely on chicken entrails rather than smoke plumes. Makes perfectly good sense to me.
When you get phoned up by a charity soliciting money, and the person on the other end of the line is very convincing - you may be talking to a convicted fraudster or confidence trickster.
Rather than owning strategic companies, the US just has a system of pork barrel politics to keep them going (e.g. anybody making airplanes, and the amazing system under which American farmers have their surplus corn bought to make ethanol which needs as much fossil fuel to produce as it replaces, for no net gain whatsoever (source: Scientific American, this month). It is also good at protectionism when required - look at how online betting companies suddenly got hit when the US realised they were foreign owned and extracting US dollars. I bet you before long they will find a way covertly to fund GM and Ford, because after the midterms the Republicans won't want any more vote losses. Any government that wants to stay in business has to find a way to rebalance the economy, because there is no such thing as a free market. Europe just tends to be a little more blatant (transparent) about it.
Good Lord, this is Slashdot. If you want academic standards of discussion and analysis, you could always try Digg!
And in case you are wondering, I think they have the right attitude. It's _your_ interpretation that suggesting that the French want to encourage the use of French and international standards, and mentioning Napoleon is xenophobia. Which suggests that you think those are bad things. Which, friend, makes you the xenophobe.