Wasnt there a SCOTUS ruling recently that ruled that agencies cannot enact their own rules, but can only enforce rules as laid out in law? And if Congress wanted the agency to enforce a rule, it should pass a law to that effect?

We all know that that was targeted at agencies like the EPA, FDA etc, to get rid of the agency-created limits on things, but it feels like it should equally apply here - the law says X, the agency cant change the law.

Most of the world is not Northern Canada, which must be where they got that number from. Maine averages 4.55 peak sun hours per day, and is the northereasternmost state in the continental United States. Even Washington state is at 3.95.

Solar panels: The roof of a trailer is about 450 square feet. In the northeastern U.S., you would average only 3.5 hours of full sun, so you'd get only a little over 13 kW per day.

So the solar generation function of a panel is no sun, no power, partial sun, no power, peak sun hours, full power.

Well, I guess that you're the expert.

So in an entire day, covering the entire roof of a trailer with solar panels would add a whopping 7 miles of range

Maybe that's enough to get you over a time zone or so so that you get an extra hour of "full sun"? ;)

After all, it's not like trailers are ever sitting idle during loading, unloading, or waiting for loads. Always moving, doncha know.

Once and for all people: "it's" (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of "it is." "its" is the possessive pronoun, which was intended here.

Yes, it is. Now think of the rule for possessives with every other type of noun (ordinary and proper) - " 's ". It's like the "i" before "e" except after "c" (and sometimes "y") rule, irregular verbs, and a host of other landmines in writing down the English language.

It doesn't help that there's a group of people actively miseducating kids about pronouns and demonizing references to them. His, hers, its, yours, theirs, and ours are all bricks paving the shoulder of the road to hell.

Plus this only blocks Youtubes adverts - these days you often have to wade through the content creators own ads, at least one for the “sponsor of this video”, and then at least one for the content creators own Patreon or equivalent merch site

Just timed a 9 minute video I was watching while browsing this story - 3 minutes of content creators ads, 6 minutes of content.

And theres no way around the content creators ads even if you do become a Patreon.

So embarrassed by the crap that you have to make up that you're posting AC? What are these free business loans only "illegals" qualify for, and where can I apply? Yo quiero links!

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

If the rest of our existence as a race, for the next however many years until we go extinct, is entirely based on what we know currently about physics, and there is nothing left to learn, no short cuts, no loop holes, no new approaches, then.... fucking hell, the future is going to be boring.

I refuse to believe that our future abilities have been set in stone by scientists who barely knew atoms existed when they came up with their rules about how the universe operates - I fully expect future generations to get around those rules, otherwise we had better get used to living in the 2020s for pretty much the rest of humanities existence.

I remain eternally hopefully that there are different ways of doing things that Einstein et al could never conceive.

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

This sounds like someone made minute, non-revolutionary advances on standard de-salination and described it as if they were the first person to invent evaporative desalination. People have been doing sun powered desalination for thousands of years.

At small scales.

At large scales, desalination plants use reverse osmosis, which pretty much inherently creates a brine that is released back into the environment. You're not "moving the salt" to any useful industrial process, since it's still rather dilute.

At best, some of those plants use solar power to drive the RO process. But we'd much rather have the electricity to power other things, so a process that uses a non-semiconducting metal surface to perform solar-powered evaporative distillation, without a need to dispose of a brine, and without relying upon solar-electric generation and conversion, is a bigger deal than you make it out to be.

The Neo is the Apple laptop here.

Dells offering is branded XPS. It sounds like you conflated the two.

So the Neo definitely has access to Apple parts - and its been confirmed to use the same SoC that was previously just used by the iPhone line of products.

So why go to the cinema to see that? I will just wait until it comes on streaming - their fuckery with season 3 has already lost my interest, so Im not going out of my way to see this.

I watched The Mandalorian season 1 and enjoyed it.

I watched The Mandalorian season 2 and ... yeah, it was good but I was mildly disappointed in the whole "you should know these characters from other Star Wars media, otherwise they are mildly uninteresting side characters that everyone else is raving about for some reason" thing.

Then .... The Mandalorian season 3 - holy fuck. You had to actually watch an entirely different season of something else first in order to pick this one up, otherwise the ending to season 2 and the start of season 3 do not join up at all. Im out. Im not bouncing between different things just to maintain a hope in hell of understanding whats going on.