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Comment Re:It's a place of business, not protest. (Score 3, Interesting) 258

This makes for a pretty effective protest, among a sea of protests that are pretty bad.

They didn't actually harm anyone or anything, they put something on the line (their jobs), they raised awareness of the situation *and* Google's role in it.

Contrast with stupid stuff like random looting or tossing food at unrelated art.

Comment Re:I don't believe them. (Score 1) 123

You can't keep your alarmist claims straight. There will be more water from the melting ice. Precipitation patterns will change but that doesn't mean there won't be a net increase in water. Sea levels are going to rise but we aren't going to get more water? Come on this is absurd.

Ok, sure, *liquid* water will see a net increase as currently solid water becomes liquid, mostly serving to increase saltwater volume, which is useless. The bigger consequence is how that more cycling through the evaporation/precipitation cycle will manifest, and it would suck if it's mostly moving water through the air to the ocean. Wouldn't be too terrible if it were the other way around, unless it's mostly in unworkably strong hurricanes. The key thing is we aren't sure.

The additional energy is heat. That heat will be plenty useful for planting crops where it was previously too cold. We already see a northward migration of life.

At best, this moves the viable agriculture land. As *maybe* new farmland would open up (hardly a safe bet), existing farm land would be made non viable. When you say "energy" I assumed you meant like hydrocarbon or electricity, which obviously won't be aided. So yes, more thermal energy, but hardly an assurance that would mean a net increase in arable land.

Plants can grow bigger and faster with additional CO2 we've already seen the earth get greener as its been warming up. You're denying observed reality and science. CO2 supplementation is an existing plant growth booster. You just don't like the truth.

I seriously doubt you have anything suggesting that we've had more successful agricultural thanks to atmospheric CO2 concentration shifts.

Why wouldn't it be comforting? CO2 isn't the reason we hadn't invented civilization. It's likely humans hadn't even evolved yet which says absolutely nothing about the issue. This is strange thinking that does not follow.

Because we know the score for the current climate and how we can house and feed ourselves. We've got very little to go on to confidently know the specifics of change. It would be foolish to assume we know, and since we are currently reasonably "good" with how things are, there's a lot more room for downside than upside. Like say I told you I'm going to rip you out of your nice house and plop you randomly somewhere on Earth to fend for yourself. Would you take that bet that you'll end up somewhere nicer than your house?

Comment Re:I don't believe them. (Score 1) 123

It means water from ground will move in different ways. Water in the atmosphere more, moving, well, we aren't sure where. We know how to deal with the hand we are dealt now, we have no idea if the new precipitation pattern will be over the ocean (useless), viable soil or not, etc.

It's not *impossible* that the new conditions will be viable, but if we can keep things as we are used to dealing with them, that would be the safer bet.

Comment Re:Not mine (Score 1) 49

It only cost ~$15k to save $90/mo in power.

The local solar installer quoted me $60k for a system that's grid-tied (no batteries) and won't run at night when the grid goes down.

I'm finding this hard to swallow.

So I'm estimating you have a system that outputs about a single megawatt hour in a month. That is likely about an 8kw set of panels. Since you mentioned enough batteries to last a few days, then I am willing to believe $15k all-in, *mostly* in battery and associated management system.

There's no way that you have a solar installer quote you $60k for a 8kw installation without battery. I see about $15k to $22k quoted. Certainly significantly more than the parts, but not $60k.

Comment Re:I don't believe them. (Score 1) 123

We don't get additional water, the precipitation will behave somewhat differently, in ways potentially we can't cope with.

The additional energy in terms of useful energy is not feasible to improve our harnessing of energy.

Plants are not so few for lack of CO2 today. We have never felt "oh, our agriculture is limited by CO2", it's limited by other factors, none of which are looking to "get better".

The simple fact is that "oh, 16 million years ago there was more CO2 than today" is not vaguely comforting when that's almost 16 million years before humans were figuring out how to do this whole civilization thing.

Comment Re:Is this a surprise? (Score 1) 18

While a lot comes from the major vendors, some of the major vendors actually kind of suck and you absolutely have huge gaps in what they provide.

Particularly with firmware, you get chunks to cover bits and pieces but you have to provide certain bits and pieces. I'm frankly shocked how bad the 'ready to go' firmware even from someone like Insyde or AMI is, who you would *think* would have it pretty well down by now. You can have the most milquetoast combination of predictable components and *still* need to do work to behave as well as a Dell or Lenovo even if the components are largely the same, as they have some on staff firmware developers that build on top of the vendors and they don't share their assets with the world. Hell, it's obvious that they don't even share with themselves, some product families are worlds apart from the exact same company with the same chipsets.

Comment Re:Weird move (Score 1) 40

Two possibilities:

- Regulatory folks have expressed "concerns", which may have motivated them to try to get some relief

- The had a plan that at least publicly anticipated tolerating 95% attrition and the other 5% were so locked in they'd pay the price needed to more than make up for the 95%. Based on a few situations I have heard about, I get the impression that not even 5% were as locked in as Broadcom presumed, so they may feel the need to buy some time to adjust their strategy to cope with that reality.

Comment Re: Shame they didn’t cover NOx, SOx, etc as (Score 1) 164

That's easy enough to flip around. Obviously your time is worth much less to you because you are happy to take time out to go to the gas station routinely for daily driving, sometimes having to wait for a place to open up, sometimes having to drive to find another gas station, having to babysit the refueling for a few minutes even in uncomfortable weather. That's in a scenario where the gas station is 'on the way' to a daily destination. Around a relatives house, they have to occasionally go about 10 miles the "wrong way" because the area is rural, but no one thinks about it because that inconvenience has been there for as long as anyone can remember.

Now if you make a weekly road trip of 300 miles or so, then sure this disappears into the time taken for that road trip anyway, and pure EV won't be that appealing (hybrid or a PHEV maybe). If you live in an apartment building or city house with streetside parking at *best*, ok, EV sucks because you don't have access to residential charging. However, for those with residential charging as an option and for whom 300+ road trips are a rare occasion, the gas station can easily be the bigger inconvience when comparing head to head.

Comment Re: Shame they didn’t cover NOx, SOx, etc as (Score 1) 164

So you are willing to pay out another $10K eventually for a battery just so that you can plug in at home?

As mentioned, I've racked up $10k in various gas engine vehicle repairs by about the same time where an EV battery might likely need repair. Colleague recently had to replace his Volt battery after 300k miles for about $6k, and that was a battery that would be a full charge cycle in just 30 miles. So if the battery repairs are going to screw me, so too would owning a gas car.

Don't you analyze your range every time you fill it up in order to determine whether that time is coming or not?

No, it gets boring after years of the range being roughly the same, more to do with driving characteristics and weather and if there's been a decline, it's unnoticable.

And when considering the fact that public charging is starting to cost almost as much as gas in certain parts of the world.

You didn't read my comment did you? Yes in some places the commercial charging is *almost* (but not quite as much as gas). This is largely academic for me.

1) You never go on long trips and never plan to

"Never" is the wrong word, but either:
      - The 2 or 3 times a year of having to 'suffer' a commercial charging provider is not enough to outweigh the *massively* more common daily driving activity where residential/work charging is sufficient, cheap, and massively more convenient.

2) If you go on long trips, your timeline is very flexible so if you charge for an extra while, that's ok.

If I have a strict timeline, I'm travelling commercial, and company is paying for rental or taxi/rideshares to close the gap. Adding 20 minutes to a 6 hour road trip is no big deal for any personal road trip. Chances are I can tuck it in with eating some food and not even have a delta. If it's longer than 6 hours, I'm probably stopping at a hotel anyway, I don't trust myself to drive safely longer than that in a single stretch.

3) You live somewhere with a lot of good public transit.

I don't see the connection here. Public transit generally covers a metropolitan area, relatively low radius of transit. Range anxiety shouldn't be a factor even in theory within public transit.

Comment Re:But not practical everywhere (Score 5, Insightful) 164

I have family in rural america, and EV charging is better than city. Because no one gives a damn if your car parks right next to your house, right next to your breaker box. Adding a hardwired L2 charger to any house with 200A service is a few hundred dollars, because all you need is the EVSE, one breaker, and a trivial amount of wire. Go more city and *maybe* you can have a car nearby, but only streetside, and maybe you are allowed to install electrical gear, at some significant expense, but maybe not. The things that make home EV charging challenging for some urban people just don't apply in the country.

On the power outage scenario, you car's battery doesn't suddenly empty, no more than your gas tanks drain. In fact, if you felt fed up with power outages, then a solar array would mean you could replenish your cars range. With plenty of land to do the panels however you feel like (much cheaper and more effective to pole mount in the country, suburban has to settle for roof mounted solar only). Of course you likely have a generator or two, that's likely a PITA because you don't run it enough and infrequently used engines have some pain points.

In terms of replacing perfectly working vehicles, that's a bad idea to replace them if they are fine. Whether ICE or EV, best thing is to "drive it into the ground", because the difference in emissions is far less than the impact of frequently manufacturing cars. *However* when the time does come for an ICE vehicle to be put out to pasture because it's just not worth fixing anymore, an EV is actually a decent choice for rural living as a selection for the replacement.

Comment Re: Shame they didn’t cover NOx, SOx, etc as (Score 2) 164

But the disadvantages of EVs just don't outweigh the advantages

Thing is, it's not that clear cut. They have different advantages.

For my use case, EV advantages outweigh the disadvantages:
-I can reliably plug in overnight as needed, which means I never go to the gas station.
-When I plug in at home, it's less than a third cost per mile driven in terms of fuel/energy
-I don't have oil changes to worry about, or air filter, or a lot of the gaskets and hoses that are frequently problematic
-My work provides free EV charging, and currently I can reliably get one of those spots, so most of my driving range is not even paying for electricity.
-It's quiet
-It's supremely good at strong and instant acceleration
-I can run it in my garage without a thought about the exhaust (e.g. during a power outage, was a shelter from the conditions)

Disadvantages:
-Public charging takes a long time and is relatively fewer. Not a huge deal for me because trips over 120 miles for me that *don't* involve commercial transportation are very rare, and I'm willing to suck up the inconvenience 2 or three times a year for the better convenience 95% of the year
-The battery will, eventually, wear out. Even the "bad" chemistries are lasting a long time in practice, however. Not *great* but I replaced a car that was racking up two to three thousand a year in various repair bills largely for issues that aren't applicable to EV, so I'll take the trade.
-The car is heavier and thus I'll also take a hit on the tires.
-It was more expensive, but recently the market took a hit and they are roughly in the ballpark of their gas powered cohorts now.

Comment Could just be the physics says "no" (Score 1) 315

If superluminal speed is quite simply impossible, then you aren't going to have an interstellar civilization. It just won't happen.

*Maybe* you could go with sublight ships, but unlikely you'd find any sort of intelligence interested in bottling themselves up for hundreds of years with a large chance of the destination actually being uninhabitable when they got there. Such an effort would likely be born out of desperation of their current planet pretty much dying, so you might have a "nomad" situation where a civilization's home dies and they spend hundreds of years quietly bottled up before they land on a new planet and go back to planetary living for a few million years. *Maybe* they have some concurrency, but not interconnection, they exist on several planets but why bother trying to keep much in touch when a communication takes hundreds of years to make the trip?

Comment Re:No need for complexity. (Score 2) 315

Besides, compared to the output of a star, our RF output is *nothing* We could be pointing a receiver straight at a planet that happened to be very RF active at the right time and we'd gloss over it because we didn't see a thing. We have a hard enough time spotting some gigantic interstellar phenomenon, no way we'd detect a tiny civilization out there by their 'incidental" emissions.

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