Innovation has died???

[Remster 24]

People always remember the "big stuff" and keep forgetting the smaller stuff.

Massive step change innovation is rare. It was rare, and it's still rare. It's easy the remember the big steps in the past, and lament about how "nothing's happened since"... Well, that's just our selective memory at work.

Incremental innovation is how most innovation happens.

Remster

[mr2mk1g 10]

We're in the middle of a revolution of no less significance than either the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution that came before it. Historians of the future will look back on this time and it will be taught as a topic in school.

The Silicone Revolution 101

Things are changing so fast that the world today would hardly be recognised by the world of only 30 years ago, never mind the turn of the century. Your colleague says consider the start and end of the 20th century - hell, consider the change between now and the start of the 21st! In 2000 if I wanted to know something obscure I had to walk to the library, order in a book, which was posted to the library, then I'd go back the library a week later to check it out and dig through it for the info. Today, I speak to my phone which pulls the info from the web and delivers it to the screen in seconds.

The silicone/digital revolution IS the major breakthrough that will be looked back on as epoch making.

[wolfriverjoe 1,340]

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We're in the middle of a revolution of no less significance than either the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution that came before it. Historians of the future will look back on this time and it will be taught as a topic in school.

The Silicone Revolution 101

Things are changing so fast that the world today would hardly be recognised by the world of only 30 years ago, never mind the turn of the century. Your colleague says consider the start and end of the 20th century - hell, consider the change between now and the start of the 21st! In 2000 if I wanted to know something obscure I had to walk to the library, order in a book, which was posted to the library, then I'd go back the library a week later to check it out and dig through it for the info. Today, I speak to my phone which pulls the info from the web and delivers it to the screen in seconds.

The silicone/digital revolution IS the major breakthrough that will be looked back on as epoch making.

^This.

I've seen it on Facebook:

What would be the most difficult thing for someone from the 50s to understand if they were transported through time to today?

The fact that I have, in my pocket, a device that allows me to communicate, by voice and text, with just about anyone in the world. I can also use it to access nearly every piece of information known to man.

I mainly use it to argue with strangers and to look at silly pictures of cats.

"There are NO situations which do not call for a French Maid outfit." Lucky McSwervy

"~ya don't GET old by being weak & stupid!" - Airtwardo

[Amazon 7]

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Quote

We're in the middle of a revolution of no less significance than either the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution that came before it. Historians of the future will look back on this time and it will be taught as a topic in school.

The Silicone Revolution 101

Things are changing so fast that the world today would hardly be recognised by the world of only 30 years ago, never mind the turn of the century. Your colleague says consider the start and end of the 20th century - hell, consider the change between now and the start of the 21st! In 2000 if I wanted to know something obscure I had to walk to the library, order in a book, which was posted to the library, then I'd go back the library a week later to check it out and dig through it for the info. Today, I speak to my phone which pulls the info from the web and delivers it to the screen in seconds.

The silicone/digital revolution IS the major breakthrough that will be looked back on as epoch making.

^This.

I've seen it on Facebook:

What would be the most difficult thing for someone from the 50s to understand if they were transported through time to today?

The fact that I have, in my pocket, a device that allows me to communicate, by voice and text, with just about anyone in the world. I can also use it to access nearly every piece of information known to man.

I mainly use it to argue with strangers and to look at silly pictures of cats.

That there are millions of peole who have hundreds or thousands of "friends" on Facebook that they have never met and probably never will. There are also thousands of clueless friggin idiots out there on Facebook who are being "Catfished" right now .

[billvon 2,400]

>Whenever a patent comes out for fuel-less cars, they get bought by either oil
>companies or car companies... Then they collect dust . . .

I have a fuel-less car charged with solar energy. I suspect you could buy one if you wanted to, as well.

[JackC1 0]

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The Silicone Revolution 101

Boobies?

[Nataly 38]

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>Whenever a patent comes out for fuel-less cars, they get bought by either oil
>companies or car companies... Then they collect dust . . .

I have a fuel-less car charged with solar energy. I suspect you could buy one if you wanted to, as well.

How long was that technology kept out of the market? Why aren't more electric cars being sold? Do they cost more to produce?? Do manufacturers think we WANT to keep paying for fuel??

Think about fuel-less motorcycles... Why are SO FEW models available?? Is it harder to make than a fuel-less car?? Somehow I think the answer is no.

Maybe I've been mislead and there are other valid reasons why these haven't been rolled out before, but forgive my cynicism if I think A LOT of people have a vested interest in continued fuel consumption...

"There is no problem so bad you can't make it worse."
- Chris Hadfield
« Sors le martinet et flagelle toi indigne contrôleuse de gestion. »
- my boss

[billvon 2,400]

>How long was that technology kept out of the market?

There have been electric cars around since the 1900's. They were tremendously unpopular between around 1920-1990; it wasn't until 1996 that EV's "came back" on the market. It's taken a lot of battery work to get them to where they are today.

With the possible exception of the Ovonics large-format patent, nothing was "kept off the market." People simply preferred gas cars.

> Why aren't more electric cars being sold?

Range limitations and price mainly. They're gaining in popularity but are still a tiny percentage of sales.

>Think about fuel-less motorcycles... Why are SO FEW models available?

There are literally hundreds of electric scooters on the market and dozens of electric motorcycles on the market.

>Is it harder to make than a fuel-less car?

No, I built one myself. They're quite easy both to build and buy.

> I think A LOT of people have a vested interest in continued fuel consumption...

I agree - but a lot of those people are consumers. Gas cars are very easy to use. So far EV's fall into three general camps:

Pluggable hybrids that can run on either gas or electric. They are pricey but do it all.

Large battery EV's. Range and acceleration is as good as any gas car but are very expensive.

Small battery EV's. Limited range but cheaper.

Many people don't want to spend the money or live with the range limitations.

[Amazon 7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle

[FlyingRhenquest 1]

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>Whenever a patent comes out for fuel-less cars, they get bought by either oil
>companies or car companies... Then they collect dust . . .

I have a fuel-less car charged with solar energy. I suspect you could buy one if you wanted to, as well.

How long was that technology kept out of the market? Why aren't more electric cars being sold? Do they cost more to produce?? Do manufacturers think we WANT to keep paying for fuel??

Think about fuel-less motorcycles... Why are SO FEW models available?? Is it harder to make than a fuel-less car?? Somehow I think the answer is no.

Maybe I've been mislead and there are other valid reasons why these haven't been rolled out before, but forgive my cynicism if I think A LOT of people have a vested interest in continued fuel consumption...

It took several iterations of battery technology to get to the point they are now. Laptops and cell phones drove that. Before that, batteries were unable to hold a charge or be recharged fast enough, and had issues with a memory effect where if they were partially discharged and then recharged, they wouldn't hold as much charge when recharged.

It does cost significantly more to make a hybrid, rechargeable hybrid or fully electric vehicle. The materials used to make those batteries don't come cheap, and they're not light. Getting a combination of a car that's light enough, safe enough to conform to any given country's safety regulations and still carrying a load of enough batteries to get any sort of range turns out to be a difficult problem to crack. If you leave out any of those parameters, the challenge gets a lot easier. It's VERY easy to make a car that will get 100 miles a gallon. It's not so easy to make a car that will get 100 miles a gallon and also have its driver survive in a head-on collision with an SUV. The crumple zones are also known as "the driver."

Then you have the chicken-and-egg problem of fueling stations being available. They're just now deploying rapid-charging stations for electric vehicles, but you're looking at having to plug it in for half an hour to get to an 80% full charge. That'd work pretty well for commuting around town, not so much if you want to do a road trip. If you wanted to do Denver to Seattle, having to stop and charge as often as you'd have to would add an extra day to your trip.

A lot of people DO have a vested interest in continued fuel consumption. Those same people are branching out into alternative fuels, solar and battery technology.

The reason we were on gasoline so long was that gasoline was cheapest. OPEC contrived to keep it cheap enough that people wouldn't be driven to conservation or alternative fuels. Demand has now increased to the point where OPEC can no longer keep the prices low, and sources of energy that weren't economical to develop before are now becoming so. Who do you think is developing those? The same energy companies you used to buy your gasoline from is who!

Don't think it's going to ever get less expensive. A "cheap" hybrid or electric car will set you back more than double what a comparable gasoline engine car will. Any fuel savings you realize from it will be offset by the increased cost of the car and the environmental impact of disposing of the batteries at the end of its life. Solar cells will save you money over their lifetime, but the first few years of savings will be consumed by installing the cells and retrofitting your house for DC current.

A hypothetical "Mr Fusion" would create radioactive waste. Fusion creates loose neutrons, and loose neutrons require shielding. After a while, all those neutrons pinging into the shielding makes the shielding radioactive (I'm not a nuclear engineer but I play one on TV.) Nothing is really free. It's very easy to see how pure economics is driving these systems, even if it's not completely evident who all the players are.

I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

[kallend 1,623]

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We're in the middle of a revolution of no less significance than either the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution that came before it. Historians of the future will look back on this time and it will be taught as a topic in school.

The Silicone Revolution 101

I think you mean silicon. Silicone is for boobies (not that there's anything wrong with boobies).

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[sfzombie 3]

see, that's what a lot of people think about this subject. the technology is there, for a prototype anyway, of an electric vehicle which is truly innovative. it's pretty cheap as well, just not fully tested at full scale.

http://kitswv.com

[Stumpy 256]

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Don't think it's going to ever get less expensive. A "cheap" hybrid or electric car will set you back more than double what a comparable gasoline engine car will. Any fuel savings you realize from it will be offset by the increased cost of the car and the environmental impact of disposing of the batteries at the end of its life. Solar cells will save you money over their lifetime, but the first few years of savings will be consumed by installing the cells and retrofitting your house for DC current.

I disagree - I think the change will come because people will start installing alternative power and cleaner solutions on new build homes, which make s a lot moe sense from an ROI perspective than retrofitting. Its already happening in fact. This will drive the technology which will lower prices.

Never try to eat more than you can lift

[FlyingRhenquest 1]

For homes it seems you can save at least some money from your electric bill. Cars are a bit harder nut to crack. No matter what you do, gasoline still always looks like the least expensive possible solution. There was a price point for gas below which a plug-in hybrid would not save you any money, or would cost more than you'd save in gasoline over the life of the vehicle. I think it was around $3 a gallon. At that price it also becomes economical to develop oil shale. Below that price, it's not worth it.

I think LNG would actually be less expensive too, and would probably remain that way right up until everyone moved to it. Damn economics...

I've wondered if you could really get jiggy with it, build up a network of nuclear reactors and build an induction charging system into the entire nationwide road system. If you could eliminate the weight of the batteries, or mostly eliminate it, as well as eliminate the range problem, electric cars would actually look like a very viable solution. That would involve a massive engineering effort -- maybe as hard as putting a man on the moon, I reckon. It'd also involve some potentially "bad" solutions since the tree huggers get worked up about nuclear things. It'd take a lot of work, and these days we choose these problems because they are easy, not because they are hard. So *shrug*.

Next up: Nation-wide water network on the scale of the Interstate Highway System...

I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

[billvon 2,400]

>There was a price point for gas below which a plug-in hybrid would not save you any
>money, or would cost more than you'd save in gasoline over the life of the vehicle. I
>think it was around $3 a gallon.

Sounds about right for current PHEV's. At $4 a gallon they make pretty good sense; at $3 a gallon it's about a breakeven (depending on a lot of factors, like all electric range.) As PHEV prices come down that price point will move down.

>I think LNG would actually be less expensive too, and would probably remain that way
>right up until everyone moved to it.

I don't think everyone will move to it any more than everyone will move to electric cars. They will just become part of the mix. That's a really important point to get to; once we have (for example) a mix of 40% gas cars, 20% diesel, 20% natural gas and 20% electric, suddenly there are much stronger market pressures to hold gas (or any fuel) prices down. If prices rise, people just switch sources. If a source becomes insanely expensive due to an embargo or something, there are readily available alternatives.

>I've wondered if you could really get jiggy with it, build up a network of nuclear
>reactors and build an induction charging system into the entire nationwide road
>system. If you could eliminate the weight of the batteries, or mostly eliminate it, as
>well as eliminate the range problem, electric cars would actually look like a very viable
>solution.

Problem there is cost. Running through the numbers we'd be looking at hundreds of millions of dollars per mile, and some of the costs (like copper and ferrite) won't go down with further development. Right now we have EV's capable of 250+ mile ranges and 4 second 0-60 times; they're just expensive ($80K or so.) So an induction charger system would have to come in under that to be competitive.

[rifleman 61]

An induction charging system wouldn't work where I live - we can't even get cable television because we're too far from any city for it to be commercially viable for any company to install it. (I live in the middle of rural wales about 40 miles from any big town)

Atheism is a Non-Prophet Organisation

[FlyingRhenquest 1]

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>I've wondered if you could really get jiggy with it, build up a network of nuclear
>reactors and build an induction charging system into the entire nationwide road
>system. If you could eliminate the weight of the batteries, or mostly eliminate it, as
>well as eliminate the range problem, electric cars would actually look like a very viable
>solution.

Problem there is cost. Running through the numbers we'd be looking at hundreds of millions of dollars per mile, and some of the costs (like copper and ferrite) won't go down with further development. Right now we have EV's capable of 250+ mile ranges and 4 second 0-60 times; they're just expensive ($80K or so.) So an induction charger system would have to come in under that to be competitive.

You'd lose a lot to resistance anyway. Unless you had a superconducting network under the whole thing, and that'd require a lot of liquid nitrogen at the moment and probably be even more expensive than copper. And if an earthquake or something compromised your system, all the liquid nitrogen would leak out and your superconducting network would suddenly become not so superconducting anymore. Which I imagine would be something of a bummer. It would also be a bummer to breach a superconducting network with a backhoe...

Still, if you could work out a way for cars to tap an electrical grid while at the same time not frying pedestrians, birds, deer, etc, you could eliminate the batteries off electric cars or maybe only have enough for a few miles of operation for traversing non-wired areas. Eliminate the cost of the batteries, meter the electricity from the road and the technology would look pretty attractive. Combine that with a bunch of nuclear reactors to generate the electricity and that'd be a huge chunk of greenhouse gasses we generate that would just be gone. There are safer proposed reactor designs that would prevent scenes like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, as well as ones that would produce a lot less waste than current reactors (Most of which were designed and built decades ago.)

I'm trying to teach myself how to set things on fire with my mind. Hey... is it hot in here?

[burtonjm 0]

I figure since there's been no innovation in the last 50 years we might as well all go back to jumping rounds

This shit, right here, is OK

[Amazon 7]

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I figure since there's been no innovation in the last 50 years we might as well all go back to jumping rounds

Only for water jumps... I am good with that.

BIG SPLASH is cool.... BIG THUD is not so cool