Comment Re:"Amid heightened tensions with Russia" (Score 1) 108
The relevant phrase is an old journalism chestnut:
"Don't bury the lead!"
The relevant phrase is an old journalism chestnut:
"Don't bury the lead!"
MO disks require (IIRC) a bit to be raised to a very high temperature to alter, while bluray just requires the organic dye to degrade (as they all do).
There are at least 3 distinct types of Blu-ray discs: Commercially pressed, -R, and -RW (well, they call them -RE, but... meh).
Only one of the three types uses an organic dye that degrades. Instead BD-RW has much in common with MO discs, and was reportedly the first format Sony developed, thanks to their existing MO technology.
You'd have to be ignorant or foolish to rely on dye-based mediums like bluray for anything archival.
You are sadly showing your ignorance of disc technology. I've handled enough of both in my time to make a far better judgment than an armchair expert.
LTO didn't even exist 30 years ago, so your experience says little to nothing about archival quality.
Enterprises have been doing this with tape for 30 years.
Tape has always had a limited life-span and is too easily damaged to completely trust with high-value archival data. Instead, archival on tape usually means "we're not quite confident enough to just delete this crap".
Meanwhile, Sony's enterprise-grade write-once (WORM) magneto-optical (MO) discs have been around for decades, are physically tougher, and impervious to magnetic fields, sold with 100-year warranties that even cover data-loss recovery costs.
BD-RW can certainly be seen as Sony's MO technology being brought down dramatically in price due to economies of scale, and intentionally to allow them to compete in the consumer space.
We have a strong total sales because of two things - we (a) have over 300 million people
Europe and the EU has many more people, yet VASTLY lower EV and plug-in hybrid sales.
(b) a lot of those cars we sell, we sell to other countries.
That's complete crap, no matter how many times you repeat it. The figures quoted are for domestic sales, and do not count exports at all.
How is this different from the last time the topic was on the front-page of
Norway at first place has 6.1% penetration, followed by five other European countries and Japan, while USA is down at 8th place, with an order of magnitude(!) less electric car penetration than Norway.
Those are bullshit numbers. That's percentage OF CAR SALES that are EVs. Areas with fewer cars to begin with are disproportionally represented.
In addition, it's BS to compare a huge country, with a bunch of small ones. There will be both extremes in the statistical distribution. If we carved-up the US into similarly-sized pseudo-countries, there would be areas with extremely high EV penetration, and they wouldn't get penalized for the parts of the US with extremely low penetration.
And just above that table:
"Plug-in hybrid sales in 2012 were led by the United States with a 70% share of global sales, followed by Japan with a 12%, and the Netherlands with 8%."
Per-capita, Japan may be ahead of the US, but Europe sure as hell isn't.
You have to look at the per capita figures, not the total.
Both Europe and the EU proper have considerably more people than the US, so they're WAY behind per-capita, as well.
If you don't like my source, you're free to provide your own to backup your ridiculous claims, but I don't expect you will...
With the adoption rate of electrical vehicles being several times as high in Europe as in the US,
"As of June 2014, the U.S. is the world's leader in plug-in electric car sales with a 45% share of global sales"
In quite a lot of Europe you simply cannot do that without substantial changes to a lot of things, which is why EV's and hybrids have quite some way to go yet.
Actually, it sounds like Europe has "quite some way to go yet."
If EVs continue to develop, and become cost-effective, they will be widely adopted, and it will be Europe that lags behind and at a disadvantage, not EVs.
you can often legally store a drum of diesel
You're still getting your fuel at a station, you're just batching the process into fewer trips and higher up-front costs.
The in-home alternative would be to have home heating-oil deliveries, which you (illegally) use to power your truck.
You can make your own biodiesel
No, I'm pretty sure I can't... I don't have vegetable oil lines coming into my house, so I'm no better off.
as a workplace who wants to support plug-in EVs is that, in doing so, you are becoming a refueler-- a gas station. You're entering another business with costs, time demands, enforcement requirements, and drama.
You could... OR you could hire a company, let them lease the space from you, and leave them to own the equipment, manage/police the equipment and the users/customers.
Oh, and plug in EVs aren't zero emissions. We're still on the hook for the power generation emissions that result from the electricity demand.
That depends on your locale. Some areas have lots of cheap hydro-power. Some areas have lots of nuclear power. Some have lots of wind, and a few have lots of solar.
Finally, there's a major equity issues. The vast majority of EV buyers are rich
That was true of automobiles at the start, too. In fact, that's probably true of damn-near any early adopter. If you think about it, those rich people are subsidizing the R&D, and will be lowering the cost for those who come after, including, eventually, the poor.
The low-income population by and large lives in apartments whose landlords are not even considering installing EV chargers.
This is a "city" problem, rather than a rich/poor problem. I've lived in plenty of apartments, where my car parked a short distance from at least one of my windows, and it would have been no trouble for me to run an extension cord out to my vehicle.
In a high-rent area, where apartments are high-rises, that becomes more difficult. But honestly, ANYBODY who can afford to live in those high rent areas, even in an apartment, is pretty well-off, themselves.
The faster you charge an EV, the more waste electricity.
High-speed charging is only needed near highways. In most situations, including yours, much lower speed charging is fine. Even if a few people might WANT high-speed charging, nothing forces to accommodate them. Certainly businesses would generally be happy to force people to stay around a little longer.
the future is in either hydrogen fuel cells or battery-swapping EVs.
That's a pretty idiotic thing to stay, for someone who has supposedly studied the problem in-depth.
Hydrogen fuel-cells are a non-starter. Horribly inefficient, difficult to store, astronomically expensive, etc.
Battery swapping would basically require an end to car ownership. Swapping the battery that you bought with your car, means you're getting the depreciated value of whoever showed-up at the station before you. It means you have to trust the fuel station you're paying $10 to, with he much of the value of your vehicle, and hope they don't completely rip you off, or otherwise just screw-up.
There's no way in hell anybody with more than a single-digit IQ would ever consent to battery swapping. It just can't work, unless we all switch to renting our EVs, making the cost of charging, and depreciation of the batteries something the company has to handle, and we can always get a new one for no extra cost, at any time, no matter what.
I was talking about long-range driving,
No you weren't, because you were using numbers for ALL gas stations. The distribution for EV charging stations would be completely different, and not as simple as just multiplying the number of gas stations by the added charging time, for so-many reasons I don't know where to start.
make the station just the pumps with card paying and they can be incredibly compact.
Not a chance. They're all large, including the ones that have NO convenience store, because of both the large fuel storage tanks that have to be installed underground, and for fire-safety, so when you have a fueling accident, it doesn't burn down the businesses right next to it.
Calculate the cost of adding that to almost every parking spot on a lot
Nope. You only need to install a few. Those who need a charge will park there. Those who don't will choose a non-charger spot. You're still hung-up on the idea of a gas station, which is not what the future looks like.
I'm not talking about the occasional Tesla vehicle going by. I'm talking about a future where this is the dominant form of transport.
It's BS to jump from the today to 100% EVs. The future gets built-out slowly... The first few charging stations will pay themselves off, and keep working, and help pay for the installation of the next few. That's vastly different than pretending that a company needs to install hundreds of them, immediately.
And for this future of yours, that's decades from now, for some reason you're using the high, early-adopter prices of these charging stations, today. Even you can't pretend that's fair.
Not only do you have to plan your driving based on where you can find a suitable outlet,
Give them a little bit of time to develop, and they'll be everywhere. They'll get the infrastructure developed even faster, since it just requires existing power lines, and little no-maintenance boxes at the corner of regular parking spaces.
waiting for half an hour every two hours isn't very competitive
I'd say that's about half-way there... Maybe a bit closer. You're already likely to stop every 4 hours or so, for food and restroom breaks. There just needs to be a charging station next to a few of those parking spots, and you'll get fueled up with zero waiting. You sure won't have to go hunt down a gas station and stand around like an idiot, waiting for it to fuel-up.
Saying how wonderful and convenient gas stations are, is like complaining that nobody runs their own steam boilers anymore... It's so wrongheaded and backwards that I can't even process it.
One of the biggest advantages of EVs and plug-in hybrids is that you can fuel-up AT HOME, overnight, drastically reducing the number of times you have to suffer through stopping at a gas station.
Replace all the cars on the long-distance highway with EVs and you'll need a service station about an order of magnitude larger in size (i.e. your typical 12-pump gas station becomes a parking lot with over 100 chargers).
Complete brain-damaged nonsense. With fossil fuels, you HAVE TO fuel-up at a station, every single time.
With electric, MOST people will fuel up, slowly, overnight, at home.
In addition, gas stations MUST be large and separate facilities you have to go out of your way to drive to/from.
EV charging stations can be (and ARE) just regular parking spaces with a small device at one corner. That means you just stop for your normal food and restroom breaks, and incidentally, your vehicle is getting fueled up with no extra time or effort from you.
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer
