No, we don't. Most people are not car people. A car is a tool. We don't care about it specs, and I don't want it to make any more noise than it has to. It adds nothing to the experience and annoys anyone else around you.

Hell, i even enjoy a nice ride in low traffic- but the sound isn't part of the fun, it just detracts from the radio or the sounds of nature around me.

You're a very tiny minority.

And costs about a third as much to drive per unit distance.

The cost of a vehicle is not its raw purchase price.

While in general I think battery swapping is a stupid idea for cars (there's way too much need for different form factors, capacities, performance capabilities, etc, and it makes up such an integral part of the structure due to its size and mass and represents such a great amount of capital one would have to stockpile), I think it could actually work incredibly well for trucks. Rather than having them in the cab, I picture them slotting under the trailers (where various hardware is already often slotted), with a power connection to the cab. It would in such a situation be very easy to have a single form factor for the batteries and very easy to remove and reinstall them - you already have a standardized shape, easy undercarriage access, and the structural strength is already right where you need it. And whenever a truck picks up a new trailer that's been sitting around for a while, it could be already charged and ready to go. The cab would of course need its own batteries to haul itself around a good distance when not towing a load, but the trailers could basically hold the power for their own towing needs. And it would have little effect on an empty trailer's cost - it just needs the mounts for the batteries installed and the wiring to feed the cab, but would otherwise be a normal trailer haulable by any vehicle.

Indeed - and they can sell people on the concept pretty easily. Rather than saying "We're going to have you charge inside our store to tempt you to buy things", they'd sell the concept as "Remember back in the day when you used to have to fill up your car with gasoline out in the cold / heat / wind / rain / etc? Now we're enabling you to charge your car in comfort indoors in our stores because we love the environment so much and want to support people like you - you're welcome!"

Big rigs don't stop at your average corner gas station.

Indeed, the slower fill times on even 10-minute fast charging stations would probably give a much better rate on converting energy-customers into convenience store customers. It could even be a loss leader, so long as there's enough market penetration to justify the capital costs.

Now, for electric cars to put them out of business, they'd have to be a relevant percentage of total vehicles - and overall, that will certainly take time. But the case becomes different in specialty markets. Different states and localities will (and already do) offer different EV incentives, and the natural use case for EVs varies between locations (urban/suburban/rural, mild vs. hot vs. cold climate, terrain, geography (isolated islands or areas without good road connects to the outside world, for example), areas with different driver profiles, and so forth). So an overall EV adoption rate of 1% might actually be 10%, 20% or more in certain areas. That could well be enough to start driving gas stations out of business in such areas, creating a potential contageon effect.

That said, business owners aren't stupid, and one expects them to adapt. For example, where appropriate one would expect gas stations to respond to increasing EV penetration by adding rapid charge stations. Electricity is cheap, but if someone needs a rapid charge (for a road trip or whatnot), they'll pay the going rate, even if it's similar to the cost of gasoline per unit distance traveled. They're not just going to say "meh, I'll just plug into a wall socket and wait overnight". So if you have an existing gas station with all of its capital costs of installing tanks and pumps already paid for, one would expect them to keep selling gasoline even as an increasing percentage of their customers switch over to electricity. Maybe they'll find it cheaper to remove broken pumps than fix them. Maybe they'll eventually hit a point where it's no longer cost effective to maintain their fuel tanks and have to stop selling gasoline altogether. But neither of these things are a "suddenly going out of business because EVs just showed up" scenario.

(Of course, there's a counter to what I just wrote, which is that - given that only a small percentage of EV charging will ever be fast charging - you're looking at a smaller potential market)

The cooler thing would be if you have enough high speed printing capacity that you could manufacture and assemble a 1000 drone swarm in a very short period of time and overwhelm an adversaries defenses without requiring a ship big enough to carry a 1000 completed drones. And then another one, and another one. You would need a tanker full of plastic and a freighter full of batteries, electronics and propellers.

âoeKill decisionâ baby.

IF the people in charge are asking for it, find and suggest a solution that can do it safely.

I'm with you so far.

If they are not willing to pay for your solution, find another, albeit less safe solution and present it with a list of assumed risks. Rinse and repeat until you have a solution they are willing to pay for with risks they are accepting, then do that.

In my experience, any "solution" that you present will be understood to do everything that they wanted.

Even if you say that they cannot have X at $Y. They will give you $Y and then demand X.

When you cannot do so, a contractor will be brought in to set up a flawed implementation that will reduce your security BUT will provide X at a price point that you said could not be done.

Which is why we see this story pop up over and over and over again.

I can update a proper linux system. apt-get update (etc etc) and I'm good. it could be a 5 yr old linux install, 10 yr even more. it will still get security and major bugfixes.

android? yeah, right. my nexus one (go ahead, laugh at the old guy with the ancient phone) has not had an update for over 3 years now; probably more than that. 2.x distro from cyan and even they stopped doing updates. I have no time in my schedule to learn android internals well enough to do this myself (I could do it for linux, but I have no desire to waste time on phone crap, too many other things to get done). and so, I am running quite old software on a mobile computer and unless I pay for new hardware (my old hw works fine, still) I can't get updates.

this is the main reason why I hate google so much. they totally messed up on the whole android build/deploy/update system. its not linux, its not separatable (gfx and kernel and ip stack all are comingled, like a college-hire might design, sigh) and you can't update just the parts you need. its a whole update or nothing at all. HOW UTTERLY STUPID.

I wish I could get to love apple gear. then again, they EOL their old products, too, and so I'd have to keep rebuying hardware just like android guys are forced to do.

I may just go back to dumb phones again. this is ridiculous. a mobile computer with wireless access, a lot of my personal info on it and yet no update mechanism at all. essentially its abandonware. hundreds of dollars and I have a device that won't ever get updated even though there's not a single good reason for that.

what I can't figure out is: was google stupid or smart when they planned this? I tend to think they were both; stupid due to having too many kids onboard who don't understand the longevity of embedded systems in the real world; and smart since they force people to keep re-re-rebuying things and that must make their hardware partners very happy. they also can ignore older hardware and save time on multiple forks and build trees. but it was all the wrong design for END USERS. we are the ones who get screwed by this.

I cannot ever forgive google. they could have kept linux clean on the phone and allowed users to update ip-stack, kernel, etc. but they put a lot of effort into NOT allowing this and we all pay for it with security problems; and ones that we won't ever be able to fix, either, unless we do the work ourselves (which is not acceptable for an embedded system).

As another noted on the Red Site:

"We'll know everything* about you and we'll be snitching (including your BitLocker key) whenever and/or to anyone we think is in our interest to. Starting Aug 15"[1]

In particular, this is more than a little disturbing.

"But Microsoftâ(TM)s updated privacy policy is not only bad news for privacy. Your free speech rights can also be violated on an ad hoc basis as the company warns:

In particular, âoeWe will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary toâ, for example, âoeprotect their customersâ or âoeenforce the terms governing
the use of the servicesâ."

As with all things Microsoft, use at your own risk. Only now, the risks to you personally are higher than ever before.

[1]https://soylentnews.org/breakingnews/comments.pl?sid=8667&cid=215390#commentwrap

>Nothing good ever comes from "installing" or "upgrading" a Microsoft operating system in place.

Got a PC with Windows Millennium pre-installed. Upgraded to XP.

Got a PC with Vista installed. Upgraded to Windows 7.

Nothing good my arse.

I can see it now:

"Slashdot: Bad Hair for Billionaires; Stuff that still does not matter."