Comment A story for those who (Score 5, Insightful) 128
A story for those who don't understand orders of magnitude?
No, the ones in our notebooks and phones don't last so long, because size and weight are more important than lasting 10 years. Cars are designed differently, for different longevity/size/weight tradeoffs than are portable electronics.
Except that Tesla (and Smarts, and the few other cars which use batteries manufactured by Tesla) use *the exact same kind* of battery cells as regular laptops (on purpose, because they are cheap and easy to source due to the economy of the scale at which they are produced).
The difference isn't the battery it self (it the exact same cell), it's the battery management software, and the usage pattern.
- Lithium batteries age with the number of cycle they go through. It happens really often that a laptop is drained all the way down to 0% or nearly 0% (lithium batteries hate that). Whereas most of the daily commute Tesla cars are subjected to are short trips that only eat a fraction of their charge.
- The more violent the discharge rate, the faster the lithium battery will age. Under heavy load, a laptop battery will get completely drained in hour or two max. On the other hand, given its range and typical speed limitation, it would take at least 4-5 hours to drain completely a Tesla. i.e.: overall the Tesla eats up much more total power than your laptop (obviously), but each of the cells is put to less stress as it needs to deliver a much lower peak current.
(The two above are also the reason why the *extended life* batteries (e.g.: 9 cells instead of 6 cells) in laptops tend to age much slower).
- Also lithium batteries are very sensitive to temperature / environment. Whereas it's not that much controlled in a laptop (the battery tends to be right next to very hot components like CPU and GPU), Tesla car batteries have almost their own A/C system.
so in short:
- no they are exactly the same batteries. but each takes completely different kind of abuses and thus at the end they tend to age differently.
I'm really surprised that fast food and other low-skill, low-wage work hasn't been replaced by robots already. {...} Fast food isn't a skill. It doesn't even come close to coffee shop barista {...} If it costs $200,000 per year to pay employees to work a fast food restaurant, and that cost can be reduced to $60,000 per year by the introduction of a half a million dollars of machinery that will last for a decade, these companies would be nuts to not replace workers with robots.
Indeed. But on the other hand, we human tend to be social being. And we tend to appreciate contact with other humans.
Some older people would insist that they *definitely* need to interact with a human being taking order at the cash register, and they *definitely* need to see humans flipping burger in the kitchen behind.
They would find alienating to pass order to a machine and have their burger prepared by a assembly-line machine.
And add to that, that people will be down in the streets protesting that they are loosing jobs, and you can see why fast-food chains are a bit reluctant to start automate everything.
But old people get older, and newer younger generations come. And our current generation, is way too much self-absorbed to care. We are too much busy tweeting and posting on facebook while in line to even care if our orders are taken by an automat or a real person : it's just a distraction delaying us from typing a reply to a youtube comment on the smartphone.
The barriers to accelerating fast-food with assembly-line like robots isn't a technical one, but a sociological one. The fast-food companies needed that the population gets used to it.
Plus those installations can provide a shedload of REACTIVE power, very, very useful for grid stabilization.
They can, but are they? I have only seen residential solar which reacted to grid overload/underload situations (i.e. situations which should never occur in an ideal world), not any which reacted to constant requirements for reactive power. Do you know of any which take part in the standard grid stabilization in normal use, outside of grid emergencies?
Will Windows Phone thrive by being a better iOS than iOS and a better Android than Android? It did not work for OS/2 20 years ago.
With the same reasoning, schools in Europe are taking the holocaust out of the history lessons, to avoid nasty remarks from muslim kids in the classroom.
No, they are not. You may be thinking of this: http://www.snopes.com/politics...
When electricity is cheap, it is because the marginal cost of producing it is low. The marginal cost is low because it does not take very much extra fuel to produce it. In other words, when electricity is cheap, its production is also less environmentally harmful. (This only holds as long as the power stations are unchanged of course.)
The Economist regularly gets this wrong by saying that electric cars are polluting more if they charge at night rather than during the day. They base this on the average pollution per kWh being higher at night. However, the average pollution does not matter. It is the marginal pollution which matters, and that is very low at night. This is really the kind of thing that economists should be specializing in getting right; I do not understand how you can be an economist and get it wrong.
Another problem is that if they do accept your CA certificate, you can issue a certificate for irs.gov and they will believe that.
The trust system in TLS is really lousy.
For the "many eyes" to work, there are quite few requirement.
Yes, being opensource is a requirement, but is not the single only requirement.
The code need to be actually readable and to attract users motivated to check it.
That wasn't the case. OpenSSL's code is known to be really crappy, with lots of bad decisions inside. Any coder trying to review it will have their eyes starting to bleed.
It doesn't attract people who might review it. It only attracts the kind of people who just want to quickly hack a new feature and slap it on the top, without having a look at what's running underneath.
The code need also to be reasonably accessible to code review tools.
Lots of reviewers don't painfully check every single last line of code by hand. Some use tools to do controls. OpenSSL has had such a series of bad decision in the past, that the resulting piece of neightmare is resistant to some types of analysis.
The problem is that some of the design decision behind openssl are so aweful that some of the code review tools just don't work well to detect bug.
Hearthbleed has specifically resisted to valgrind, because the geniuses behind openssl had implemented they own memory management replacement functions in a way that is resistant to memory analysis.
The memory porblem went undetected.
You should find another bank.
Yep. There are plenty of banks to choose from that - whatever their other flaws - at least take security seriously. If your bank can't or won't lock down their website, then you already know that they're negligent in at least one area. What else are they neglecting?
I don't think it's extreme at all. I think we're past the point that's it's socially reasonable or responsible not to encrypt all traffic by default.
Even if you're 100% OK with visitors to your site being snooped on, consider that adding to the amount of crypto in use worldwide makes it hard for repressive governments to tell what their citizens are doing online. Maybe your site would be the straw that broke the Great Firewall's back and lets some kid read uncensored news.
We might cut the future increases, but cutting to half of current levels? I don't see that happening, you'd need FAR more than a carbon tax to make that happen.
The modest carbon tax in British Columbia has cut emissions in that province by 16% while emissions grew in the rest of Canada by 3% (a rate that likely would have grown higher still if Ontario and Quebec weren't also working to reduce emissions). A carbon tax, by itself, might not reach a 50% reduction, but it could spur changes in consumer behavior. For instance, now that gas prices have fallen again, sales of SUVs are increasing again after declining during our last period of high prices. That's probably a missed opportunity to reduce emissions.
Without a carbon tax, the United States is aiming at (and currently looks like it will hit) a target of 20% below 2005 levels. If a carbon tax had been added to the policy, the United States might have been able to hit 40% below 2005 levels, which is not that far from 50%.
It's almost like they even consider 11% too much... It's like they forgot why they forked to Firefox in the first place.
I'll miss "Password Maker" but I think it's really time for me to ditch it completely.
Does Chrome have anything like Firebug?
Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes. -- Mickey Mouse
