This. It was stupid.

In twenty-four hours this will go from "illegal" to "high demand professional camera service" for promotions, events, etc.

Sorry, that's already illegal (according to the FAA).

Just a few weeks ago the FAA issued an interpretation of existing rules that declared illegal any commercial use of video from a drone.

Nonsense. Emoticons are pop culture detritus, not formal grammatical entities. But by all means, you let me know when they pop up in Strunk and White's.

I dont get it. The average depth of oil/gas wells here in Oklahoma is approx 5,000 ft. The typical depth of earthquakes here in Oklahoma is approx 16,000 ft. I'm not seeing a connection between the two.

First: You're looking at the wrong wells. What's the depth of the injection wells?

Second: The depth of the well doesn't particularly matter, as long as it connects the water to a fault system. The water spreads out through the fault, turning it into a hydraulic jack the size of a small eastern state or so. The faults aren't purely horizontal and the pressure (except for an added component at greater depth from the weight of the water above it) is the same everywhere.

So of course the earthquakes take place at the usual depths where the "last straw" rock finally gives way.

Irrelevant. You're still limited by supply rates and feed wire heating.

LOL. No, you most certainly are not. Supply for the vehicle is from local storage, charged slowly over time, ready for fast discharge when needed; inevitable because of the requirement to move the load to the times when the plants have available generating capacity. You can't just pull at peak times, think about the consequences. What you're missing is the dynamics of supply. As for feed wire heating, that's absurd. At these lengths, and these voltages, it's simply not a problem. Then there's the obvious: you can always make the plug bigger, or use more plugs if charge rate limiting was a problem, which of course it isn't anyway for a vehicle in the weight range of a car, pickup or SUV. Commercial trucking might present some minor design challenges, but not serious ones. They're more likely to be resolved with conventional gearboxes than untoward amounts of raw power anyway. Now, an oceangoing vessel power plant, that might be interesting. However, then we have long times in port, so perhaps not even then.

Irrelevant. What, you think cars have multi-megawatt inverters and motors?

I know that with multiple high energy motors, motor peak current demands can be very high, particularly in the case of high power motors that batteries aren't good for, and that semiconductors can be arranged for very high parallelism.

10 years-ish isn't good enough for you?

Oh heck no, not even close. We own three vehicles; all are older than ten years, and none show any signs of needing anything more serious than the windshield wipers and tires needing replacement from time to time. I have no intention of replacing them in the next ten years, either, unless EVs real;ly take off. Furthermore, if the ones I have now were electric and UC powered, I'd just move the UCs to the next vehicle. There are plenty of vehicles on the road that are far older than ten years; the need to replace a huge battery pack at ten years has a serious impact on TCO and resale value (yeah, it's nine years old, in a year you're going to need a $10k pack. I'll give you the car for $500, how's that?). I expect to be able to replace the batteries in my vehicles with UCs, in fact, well before electric cars become common. Heck, I could do it now in the pickup, if I wanted to take up some space in the bed. The electronics required are trivial. It's tempting, too... -40 is quite a challenge for batteries, we have to keep a heating pad going under them in order to keep them working decently. Montana's not a great environment for batteries at times. I'd have to rig a cover for it all, probably lose 6 inches of depth in the bed. Hmmm. :)

The life expectancy of supercapacitors is identical to aluminum electrolytic capacitors

As it happens, I'm a collector of old audio gear. When kept in service, electrolytics run for many decades (lots of mine are from the 1970's, so that's 45 years so far) and they hold up, too. It's only when they are unused for long periods of times that they don't. Recapping is pointless if the unit has been kept in service -- I've put this to the test many times. The idea that their lifespan in use is ten years is a complete myth. Furthermore, check the cycle rate: the charge/discharge rate for a UC in vehicular motive service is doing so (perhaps) once a day. They allow for millions of cycles before any performance change is encountered. So use in a vehicle, as long as they keep being used, is many times the ten year underestimate. I've also got a bank of fifty of the early Maxwell UCs here in my radio room, they're well over fifteen years old and they're still just fine, every one of them. Because I *use* them. So I'm not buying any claims that they're much different than electrolytics (although I would expect that, given the unit cost, they'd be made much more carefully.)

Overheating of the supercapacitor can occur from continuous overcurrent or overvoltage charging.

Yes, yes, of course you can break them if you misuse them, but the relevant point you are ducking here is that an UC won't overcharge if a continuous supply is applied to them that is under their rated voltage. This simplifies charging system design enormously, and passes on zero aging and wear effects to the UC. Look at the various high power battery technologies and compare.

Show me a single type of ultracap which can be recycled at all.

Show me one in continuous, low cycle rate use that needs to be. Look on EBay. Search for them. Look at all the used ones pulled from equipment. Why do you think that is? It's because they're still perfectly good, regardless of what happened to the equipment they were installed in. Look in particular at the exact units offered for sale -- a very large number are well over ten years old. All of mine are; my initial curiosity resulted in a buying spree, and that eventually turned into the DC supply for my radio station, which requires about a kilowatt and a half when fully dialed up. I get a solid hour of runtime there, more without the linear running. Not a battery in sight. That's been working flawlessly since it was put into service just before 2000. I designed and built all the electronics (required to keep a steady 12v output as they discharge), there was nothing that had to be done that would raise any competent EE's eyebrows. UC configuration is fused parallel.

In short, please stop with the standard BS mythology of what ultracapacitors are, because it's just not in accordance with reality.

Well, you can say anything you want, but I don't think you've demonstrated any of this, and further, you're rather conveniently ignoring the current research, which (of course) is largely targeted directly at this application. But time will tell.

1 1/2 orders of magnitude worse volumetric energy density and 1 1/2 orders of magnitude worse gravimetric energy density

Yes, that's exactly what I was talking about. Are you actually ignorant of the rate of technological disruptions we've seen pop up in tech after tech? This area will require one. Which is exactly what I was telling you above, so it's kind of pointless to tell me back, don't you think? I think it likely there will be one -- again, look at the current lab work. If not, well then there you go. Again, time will tell. Your opinion, or mine, won't.

This was on Gizmag yesterday... like many of Slashdot's articles...

Give it a rest.

Slashdot is not an investigative journal or a follower-and-repeater of press releases. It's a bunch of nerds pointing out interesting stuff to each other, and talking it over, with a few nerds vetting the postings before they go up on the "front page".

That means, like Wikipedia, it's not generally a primary source. It also means that, for real news items, it is generally about a day behind.

If you want news in a timely fashion, go read Gizmag and a bunch of other acutal reportage sites. If you're willing to wait a little bit and then talk it over with a crowd of acquaintences (some of whom might actually know more about it than the newsies), this is the place for you.

Is the end result graphene, a lattice of carbon atoms, or not? What exactly is a "substitute carbon nanosheet" if not graphene itself?

It sounds to me like they're hedging because they haven't fully characterized what they get.

As I undetstand it, producing carbon fiber from plastic consists of stretching a plastic (such as rayon - a string of carbon hexagons joined by oxygen links, or polyacriolnitrile - a carbon backbone with a C2N group hanging off every other carbon) so the long-chains are alligned, then baking off the other elements (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen). This leaves just the carbon backbones (with additional carbon-carbon bonds from the loss of the hydrogen and whatever. Result: long, narrow, straight or crumpled ribbons of graphite-like hexagons, in a bundle, perhaps with occasional crosslinks, side-bumps, and other debris.

So I'd think that, if they did this on a surface, with something that didn't polmerize in two dimensions, they wouldn't end up with the nice, clean, carbon chicken-wire fence of graphine. Instead they'd end up with little graphine patches and strips, interconnected irregularly, and not restricted to an atom-thick plane.

But I'd expect the result to, like graphene, conduct well and be very strong. Just not as strong and conductive as a perfect graphene layer, perhaps with some odd electrical activity from the deviations from the regular structure acting as "impurities', and higher resistance due to shorter mean free paths for charge carriers as they bump into these irregularities.

[suggests] relocate[ing] GitHub (servers, company and all) outside the US to avoid those DMCA take downs? ... Next question: what country would be most friendly to Open Source yet resisting the insatiable hunger of the copyright trolls?

How about Antigua?

Antigua recently won a suit against the US over its ban on online gambling (a major source of foreign exchange income for the country). As a penalty, the WTO awarded Antigua the right to freely distribute "American [copyrighted] DVDs, CDs and games and software", up to $21 Million per year.

GitHub doesn't charge for the software it distributes (getting revenue mainly from things lik companies storing their OWN, PRIVATE repositories on their servers). So I'd think a company like GitHub, incorporated, owned, and hosted there, would consume $0 of the $21MM/year allocation, and could freely and legally distribute copyrighted material with US copyright holders - at least until the year after the US congress finally repeals the anti-online-gambing laws.

Oh that DMCA was issued by Cyveillance ...

According to an Ausdroid "excllusive", a "Qualcomm representative" has already:
  - repudiated and retracted the takedown notices,
  - promised they will pursure any issues directly with the project maintainers.
  - appologized to the project maintainers.

Unfortunately, this was in a communication with Ausdroid and apparently not in a form that would let GitHub over-the-holiday staff put the repositories back up immediately.

That's a pity. Many of the contributors to open source projects are volunterers with day jobs. This makes three-day weekend holidays "prime time" for a hackfest. Taking down the repositories over such a period is a serious hit to productivity. If they'd done it early in the week, rather than just before a three-day holiday, their error could have been corrected in hours rather than (exceptionally important) days.

(Fortunately, since the revision control system is git, where each checkout is a full copy of the repository, the hit is mainly impeeding inter-member cooperation, rather than bringing all work on the projects to a screeching halt.)

I hope both Qualcom and some of the affected projects bring actions against Cyveillance, if only to make them leery of issuing anti-FOSS takedowns at such sensitive times.

The DMCA does not allow you to refuse to process notices due to unpaid processing fees.

Does it allow somethig like this?

1) OSP charges the takedown filer a $1,000 (or $10,000, or whatever) fee to process a notice.

2) The fee is waived if the alleged infringer fails to file a counter-notice.

3) If a counter-noitce, is filed, the takedown filer is notified, perhaps with a check-box list of the alleged imfringer's claim(s), but DOES NOT RECIEVE THE CONTACT INFORMATION until the fee is paid (or satisfactory payment arrangements made).

4) The fee (or the bulk of it, or a pro-rata share) is waived if the takedown filer notifies the OSP, in a timely fashion, that it does not wish to pursue the takedown at this time and the OSP may put-back the material immediately, rather than waiting for the statutory time.

Assuming the OSP may legally withhold the counter-filing contact information pending payment without jepoardizing the safe harbor, this could be implemented entirely by an OSP. A troll operation would have to pay up to get the information needed to pursue its extortion. The OSP would not be stiffed for its fees if the trolls want to move on to the next step (and could still pursure collection even if the trolls DON'T pay up after the counter-notice is filed).

It would have the advantage (over "losing filers get a big financial hit" approaches) that it does not create a financial incentive for copyright claimants to pursure an iffy or bogus suit in order to avoid a large fine or damages payment.

Explain to me, then, why none of the local shops can fab aluminum beyond cutting it, and all of them can, and do, work in iron and steel? Last time I went hunting for aluminum fabrication capability here (last year) I came up completely dry.

I don't get the obsession with ultracaps.

No? Here's the litany, then:

Near-instant charging. Much higher discharge rates, so much higher instantaneous power availability, and that without developing significant heat, because their series resistance is negligible, and that in turn means less energy spent as waste heat. Enormously more charge/discharge cycles than anything in battery tech - so many more, you could will ultracaps used in a vehicle context to your children, and they to theirs. No more replacement concerns. Much wider range of usable performance over temperature; much colder, much hotter. Much less need for recycling because of the comparatively much longer lifetime. They can't be overcharged at their rated voltage, they simply stop taking charge. Consequently, they can be infinitely trickle charged, so for instance, solar panels on the roof can help keep a vehicle topped up. They have completely predictable, and 100% stable, discharge curves, so a five year old ultracap performs just as well as a brand new one, plus the predictability and stability enable trivial measurement of consumption, hence permanently accurate gauges that tell you your remaining range, etc. Without having to take age or usage patterns into consideration. These are just the advantages the ultracap has over chemical batteries. Ultracaps also share every significant advantage batteries offer: power distribution system already in place (compare to building a hydrogen infrastructure); it's trivial to implement a bucket brigade style of charge storage so that the grid can be tapped when there is (presently) excess capacity; much more efficient use of power with electrical motors and centralized generation as compared to IC engines; ability to acquire and use solar power; agnostic as to where the power comes from, so as sources get greener, so do battery and UC uses of electrical power; no air pollution in operation; relief of pressure on petrochemical supplies and consequent relief of remaining dependence on foreign petrochemical supplies.

The show-stopper is insufficient energy density, or to look at it from the other direction, sufficient energy requires too much weight and space. The hope is that with so many attempts being made to solve that, it will happen sooner rather than later.

UC's have many characteristics that make them inherently superior to batteries. They have only that one failing. Fix that, and there would no reason at all to go with a battery.

Thanks. :)

For someone who only occasionally uses the vehicle, a roof full of solar panels would keep it fully charged and ready to go for the weekly trip to the grocery store. I no longer drive a great deal, and I've been thinking this might be just the thing for around-town use about 8-9 months out of the year here (can't see a sedan as a practical winter vehicle.) And it can charge while moving, and while you're in the store or other place doing what you need to do. Not too bad!

The only thing is that it has to be mostly parked. Otherwise, not enough power in as compared to power out, and then you're back to a tethered, cost-plus vehicle.

rimshot.