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. :)

That doesn't actually make any sense whatsoever. There's nothing even remotely suspicious about a person trading a one-time benefit in recompense for an extended benefit he provides to another.

It is dubious when that one-time benefit can be taken away at any time, as a job can be, or can suddenly turn sour like a job can.

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard."

Oops. Wrong stage of evolution. We're not there yet.

Do the math? What math, it's all the same. If the property has 1 mile road frontage or 10 feet, that 1 mile or road still needs all those services. If the property is valued at 10 dollars it still needs the same services as if the property is valued at 2 million dollars.

But the cost of providing those services isn't the same. First, the probability of a forest fire is roughly proportional to the area of land, because lightning doesn't care. Second, people are more likely to steal from big, expensive houses than slums, and people are more likely to build big, expensive houses on large pieces of land than small ones, so police protection tends to be (at least to some extent) proportional to land area as well.

Even things like utilities cost more for larger pieces of land, because the utility companies have to run their cables past your property to get to the next potential customer, and the longer your property is, the more it costs to do so. They only get one customer per property, so larger properties effectively raise the installation cost for everyone on your block.

And unless you're at the end of a street, the street has to go past your house, not just to it. Therefore, the cost is directly proportional to the width of the piece of land, so longer pieces of land should pay more in taxes. This also applies to the cost of fuel for police driving past your house when they patrol your neighborhood, the cost of running water pipes past your house for fire protection, etc.

In other words, the costs are almost all proportional to area.

That's changing the goal post a bit isn't it? Taxes do not pay the insurance coverage. the city or whatever government entity does not provide the insurance. More expensive property will cost more to insure primarily because it will cost more to replace anything of higher value. But the police and fire are not used more then cheaper properties.

Actually, they are, to some degree. When's the last time you heard of somebody breaking into a falling down shack because they thought the person might have stuff worth stealing? And as I said, forest fires are proportional to area. And house fires... well, those are more determined by the age of the home than anything else, so those tend to be inversely proportional to the cost of the home, but they're still mathematically related. :-)

If he got that big a dose and lived, he should seriously play the lottery.... IIRC, that's right about at the line where everybody above that line dies within a week or so....

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.

I got the impression that the cost savings were in manufacturing. Machining and otherwise dealing with steel is a quite different set of tasks and requirements as opposed to trying to make essentially the same components out of aluminum; admittedly, steel is heavier (hence the lesser range, perhaps) but it's a lot easier to fabricate steel. Every tiny shop I know of can do it, while handling aluminum is still somewhat of a speciality undertaking.

Ultracaps. So far, in the field, they're no threat WRT energy density. Pretty much everything else, though, they blow batteries away.

There are plenty of in-lab efforts ongoing right now that bring the energy densities up to par. It remains to be seen which one(s), if any, can make it to market in such a way as to displace the role of batterie; that's all about expense, presuming energy density is licked.

Bottom line, though, is that battery tech isn't likely to continue to hold its ground for much longer, barring some disruptive discovery in its own domain.

fucking moron. Why don't you go wine(sic) somewhere else

If only one could subsist off of irony. Slashdot alone could feed the world...

...but man, you should see how flat that train squashed my penny!

people who were bad, still are bad, and don't want you to find out easily

So the best solution is to brand everyone as untrustworthy? Please. If person X is still bad, that's a matter for law enforcement. Not for your back-fence gossip fest.

Some of this would be solved by simply not indexing local news stories and police blotters. As these are generally of interest mostly to locals (surprise!), little loss of significant information access would occur. I already know where to go for my local information. I don't really benefit from the ability to find your local news and police blotter without an actual interest in your locality (and in which case, hunting down your local websites is trivial.) The ability to see everything from everywhere by searching for the essential equivalent to "search term: John Doe" is only something really of benefit to the gossipmonger's mentality. I really don't think you could ever convince me that such gossip is of much positive use to society.

Google wouldn't even have to do anything; all it would take is a legislated robots.txt entry, and bingo, local news and blotter gossip is gone.

So for you, the only kind of suffering is "pain", eh? Are you always this simpleminded, or did you take a stupid pill especially for this conversation?