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Comment Re:I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids but .. (Score 1) 135

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.
 

Comment cobalt chemistry, not so nice. (Score 1) 115

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.

Comment I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids but ... (Score 1) 135

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).

Comment Re: Cue up (Score 1) 348

You realize there are a bunch of homes available for sale in all sorts of places for next to nothing. The problem isn't "housing", it is "housing where people want to live". Declining population in places like Italy have created housing collapse where nice houses aren't sold, and sit empty, and they'll pay you to move into one.

Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 192

It isn't colonial, it is industrial. The current format of school is that of preparing for a factory workforce. We are post industrial, knowledge/AI/Whatever it will be called workforce.

Educators need to come to grip with getting EVERY child their MAX educational value we can. This means breaking the rows and columns of desks in a classroom, and getting kids their most valuable education they can get. This means some will do much better than others. Talent has gradations. Not everyone can be a Astro Physics expert.

Comment Re:Cue up (Score -1, Troll) 348

"fair" is subjective. What you think is "fair" isn't really fair. It is objectively unfair to use qualitative terms in discussion of policy.

What would be fair, is that Government live within the means we ALREADY tax out of the public. Cut Spending first. Then, when all cuts that can be made, are made, then MAYBE we can have a discussion on tax increases.

Its Not Your Money.

Envy isn't a virtue.

Submission + - Slowbooks, AI coded cleanroom re-imagined Quickbooks (github.com)

Archangel Michael writes: The Story
VonHoltenCodes ran QuickBooks 2003 Pro for 14 years for side business invoicing and bookkeeping. Then the hard drive died. Intuit's activation servers have been dead since ~2017, so the software can't be reinstalled. The license paid for is worthless.

So he built his own replacement, transferred all his data from the old .QBW file using IIF export/import.

The codebase is annotated with "decompilation" comments referencing QBW32.EXE offsets, Btrieve table layouts, and MFC class names — a tribute to the software that served him well for 14 years before its maker decided it should stop working.

This is a clean-room reimplementation. No Intuit source code was available or used.

(Side Note from story submitter. This is the beginning of the end of Windows only applications)

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