1) Satellite networks already have inter-satellite communications. It's not new.
2) It's much easier than mesh networks on Earth. It's not an improvised network; you know exactly where every craft should be, down to incredibly fine accuracy, and they're all built specifically to operate with each other. And there's no random physical obstructions.
My understanding is that it's a "last mile" solution where the last mile can actually be several hundred. The signal goes up to the satellite and straight back down to the nearest ground station.
The last part is your error. It does not go to the "nearest ground station" to the user. It goes to the latency-weighted nearest ground station to the server which the satellite can reach. Furthermore, it's hopped directly into backbone traffic instead of filtering up through a progressive series of IPs. For example, if I traceroute anywhere out of Iceland, there's six hops within Iceland, then the traffic goes to London, then there's two hops, and then it hops onto a series of backbone routes to wherever it needs to go in the world, whether that's China, the US, elsewhere in Europe, etc. With the SpaceX constellation, the first 8 hops would disappear and be replaced by one hop through the satellite and one from the ground station to the most appropriate backbone; a single satellite could reach to North America, Europe, or North Asia from here.
For all the cases where the signal has to go via more than one satellite, you're fucked
You for some reason are assuming that the satellites have slow packet processing, or abnormal processing delays. Or perhaps you're mistakenly thinking that the physical distance traveled is longer? These are LEO satellites; for most traffic, it's shorter, as it doesn't involve snaking around the world wherever backbone lines happen to be laid.
more so when everyone is trying to do the same thing
Only a very small minority of traffic is routed satellite-to-satellite.
The reason I'm being so definite in my criticism is that we know that mesh networks don't work well (plenty of literature on the topic)
Wow, that totally makes you an expert on satellite communications, and makes you know more than SpaceX, Qualcomm, Samsung and Lockheed.
"When ground stations can't hear each other" - what do you mean by this? Are you referring to obstructions / interference with a given satellite? The receivers are phased-array (aka virtually instantly steered) antennas and there's always multiple satellites in the sky. The satellites have both satellite-to-satellite and satellite-to-ground communications. So data can be re-routed if there's need. That said, the internet gateways ground stations (unlike typical home receivers) will be positioned and laid out specifically with the intent of minimizing obstructions and interference, for obvious reasons.
OneWeb also exists (Virgin Group and Qualcomm). But they've hitched their horse to Blue Origin, so they better hope that Bezos pulls a rabbit out of a hat;)
There are laws of entropy that govern how much actual data can be passed as specific frequencies
Indeed there are... in a given space. Which is why the satellites use narrow spot beams. Each beam from the lower planes targets only 52 square kilometers (a circle with a 4km radius), while the upper planes' beams are 550km^2 (a circle with a 13km radius).
While the satellites do direct satellite-to-satellite communications as well as satellite-to-ground, they're not designed to replace internet backbone services or major service provider connections; e.g. Google isn't going to be hosting its servers directly across the network. Rather, in addition to user terminals, there's also ground terminals ("gateways") that connect directly to internet backbones; the constellation is designed to provide "last leg" services. However, the distances between the user and the gateway that their data gets transmitted to can be very significant.
The SpaceX constellation is essentially global, and the intent is to undercut most global wired broadband connections on both speed and price; it'll be capable of up to 1Gbps per user, and the costs of the service will be spread around the globe. Previously this would have been unthinkable, but over the past decade there's been both a massive advance in satellite capabilities (per unit mass) and a massive reduction in launch costs (per unit payload mass). And it's all to be in LEO (nearly 12000 identical, mass-produced, mass-launched satellites), not GEO, so latencies are as low as or lower than traditional net service.
They may well pull it off. It's become so clear that such a service is now possible to implement that SpaceX's biggest problem is getting theirs in place before the competition; Samsung proposed such a constellation in 2015, and OneWeb (funded by Virgin Group and Qualcomm) is actively working toward one.
One interesting theory that's been batted around is that Teslas (and presumably other cars) will quickly switch over to it for their connectivity rather than relying on 4/5G service. You can't switch phones to it because the receiver is a phased array antenna about the size of a pizza box - but you can certainly have such a receiver in a car.
I have a lot to criticize Obama for on the foreign policy front. But the Status of Forces agreement (signed by Bush) between the US and Iraq ran out in June of 2009. A temporary extension was negotiated, but the Iraqi government refused to extend it past December 2011. What should the US have done to get to stay - overthrown the Iraqi government? The US was actively trying to extend their stay in Iraq.
That would have been quite the trick, given that Obama was elected to the US Senate in November of 2004, but the Iraq invasion started 20 March 2003, and the vote that enabled it passed in October 2002.
Barack Obama, Time Lord.
While he certainly couldn't have voted on the war in 2002, Barack Obama was, however, routinely speaking about it. Against it. Indeed, he was one of the main speakers at an anti-war rally in Chicago against the proposed bill, on 2 Oct 2002.
They indeed have the richest deposits, but far from the only ones. It seems a lot of companies have been souring on Congo cobalt. They've done a pretty good job working to eliminate artisinal cobalt from their product streams (although there still are some less scrupulous buyers, and origins are sometimes successfully disguised), and a lot are worried about supply reliability. Which is why you've seen most of the new "cobalt rush" outside of the Congo.
Congo will continue being a major global supplier, but their share of the market will decline.
What gets me about all of the Icesave nonsense is all you had to do was click through to the terms - just 1-2 clicks from the front page of the website about Icesave accounts - and it listed the insurers. The #1 insurer was a private fund. The #2 insurer was the British government (in the UK; the Dutch government in the Netherlands). It was explicitly spelled out! And indeed, that's how it should have been according to banking regulations; private funds were perfectly acceptable as the primary insurer, and the country of the citizens purchasing the product is the secondary insurer. Of course, the private Icelandic banking fund went bankrupt in the crash, which passed the liability on to the secondary insurers (aka, the UK and Dutch governments). Who sued Iceland in the EFTA court, to try to get Iceland to take on their liabilities. And - I can't stress emphasis on this enough - lost on all counts.
Should banking regulations have allowed private funds to back accounts? Probably not. But they were what they were.
That's not to say that there weren't Icelanders who contributed to the crash - far from it. The level of criminality going on among top figures in the banking industry to deliberately prop up bad assets and make off like bandits was insane. But people here are as angry with them as people elsewhere, as they crashed our economy. Our currency literally got cut in half. Picture that, in a country where most goods are imported. Picture that, in a country where loans were generally denominated in foreign currencies. The 3 banks that went under had combined liabilities equal to half that of Lehmann Brothers... but in a country 1/1000th the population of the US. It was devastating.
And on top of that, we had the British trying to stick us with their liabilities and treating us as terrorists. You know, the UK - the country that spent decades stealing our fish and depleting our stocks. But hey, if you want your nets back, you can have them.;)
Oh, and to give you an idea of what Icelanders generally think of planning ahead: there's a place near where I live where there's bridge piers in the middle of a fjörd, but no bridge. And no road, either. Where you'd need a road to connect to the hypothetical bridge, there's houses on one side and businesses on the other, blocking any way to access it. They started building the bridge, then just changed their mind and put neighborhoods and businesses instead, and then later built a different bridge further west.
Now, if that were a unique case that would be one thing. But it's not. Maybe 5-10 kilometers further north, they did it again. At least there's no houses blocking that one, but... they started building a bridge, and then just stopped.
Why would power prices go up if icelands decide to store and provide power for the EU?
Power prices are much lower here than in mainland Europe. So they'd rather sell to mainland Europe than here, until prices go up enough here to match mainland Europe.
Actually, most Icelanders are rather wary of that scheme. The big issue being that it will raise our power rates. It would be worth it if the revenue from those power sales would go to the general public (offsetting taxes), but we have way too much history with corporate dealmaking here to buy into such a story. The other issue is of course that it means a mass expansion of power generation infrastructure. If it were just wind and geo, I wouldn't have an issue, but (again, as history consistently tells) they'll just build giant dams, destroying our highlands one canyon at a time.
This article's title, BTW, that Iceland is "speculation shy"... if only it were true. Iceland is, and probably always will be, a country that goes through one bubble after the next, always hopping head-first into the next get-rich-quick scheme with little to no advance planning or caution. Not that there are parties (including the aforementioned Pirates, to which Smári belongs) who would take a more cautious, you-really-should-think-things-out approach. But so long as Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn gets in power - and they virtually always do - "due caution" will not be in the government's vocabulary. And there's all too many parties willing to go right along with them down the fast-money rabbit hole (Framsóknarflokkurinn, Miðflokkurinn, etc).
BTW, trivia: while "Smári" most commonly means "clover", it can also mean "transistor" - which I find ever-so-fitting for a Pirate MP.;)
Please start with looking up what VAT stands for. Value Added Tax. At each stage where value is added to the product stream, VAT is levied. Are you saying that bitcoins are worth no more than the power? That the company is mining them for giggles?
If a company makes alumium, their alumium sales are taxed as well as them paying corporate taxes. It should be no different with bitcoin mining.
It's worth pointing out that modern NMC and NCA cells are only 15-20% cobalt in the cathodes - the cathodes in turn being only part of the cell mass, and the cells only being part of the pack mass. They keep working to push its percentage down, since it's the costliest element by mass. The bulk cathode material is nickel, which is already mined in bulk as a steel alloying agent. Last forecast I saw was that li-ions were only supposed to increase nickel demand 10-40% by 2025.
While some cobalt demand will be made up with new mines (it's historically not been worth spending much money in prospecting for it), a large chunk will simply be recovered by adding recovery circuits to existing mines, since cobalt can be found pretty much everywhere that a wide range of commonly mined metals are found (copper, silver, nickel, zinc, etc). At previous cobalt prices it wasn't worth amortizing the recovery hardware costs, so cobalt just went out in the tailings.
Thank you, I was about to write that same thing. That 60 kg figure must be carbonate, not metal.
The reversible lithium intercalation reaction between carbon and cobalt oxide is 11,2 kWh/kg. So for a Model 3 LR-sized LiCoO2/C battery, that's only 7kg of lithium. Of course, you have to increase that a bit because not all lithium will be available for intercalation at any given point of time. But that would strongly argue for 60 kg being carbonate, not metal.
This states that a 2Ah 18650 of the type Tesla uses in the Model S and X contain 0,6g of lithium (metal). Tesla's are 3285 mAh, so 0,975g per cell. At 4,2V per cell, that would be 0,0714 kg/kWh. So for a Model 3 LR-sized battery, that comes out to 6kg of lithium.
Let's be pessimistic and say 9kg of Li metal in a Model 3 LR. At 18,7% lithium, the carbonate equivalent is 48kg. And let's go with a price of $14/kg. That's $126 for the lithium. At 0,2kg cobalt per kWh, that's 16,1kg cobalt. At $80/kg, that's $1288. At a 5:1 nickel cobalt ratio, that's 1kg nickel per kWh. At $13/kg, that's $1046. Everything else in a pack is a mixture of alumium, manganese, organic electrolytes, carbon, silicon, copper wiring, a wide range of plastics, etc. Let's go with an average of $2/kg for the remainder. Tesla's Model 3 LR packs (not individual cells) are (roughly) rated by the EPA at 150Wh/kg. That comes out to 537kg. The other way we can analyze it is compare the 80,5kWh LR pack to the 80,5*31/46=54,25kWh SR pack (26,25kWh difference) and the 121kg difference between packs, which would suggest 371kg. Let's go with 450kg. So ~345kg that's not nickel/cobalt/lithium, or $690. Summing it all up: $3150 of raw materials. Or $39 per kWh.
$39/kWh while demand is outpacing supply. Even less when prices return to their historic levels.
Battery packs are, and will continue to be for the time being, limited by production costs, not raw material costs. Hence the reason why first Tesla - and now everyone - has pursued the strategy of "go big".
That's perfectly normal usage. It's weird that you'd focus on that aspect and not on the fact that Nikola is a company running purely on hype and without anywhere near the funding to achieve what they want to, nor the fact that none of their numbers actually add up. Or the fact that they keep changing their business model once or twice a year.
I'm not sure what bad experience you had with Autopilot, but it doesn't match my experience at all. Or those of all of the pages that turn up when you google comparisons between Autopilot and ProPilot (I can't personally compare as I've never driven a ProPilot car). But, I'll try ProPilot myself when I get the chance so I don't just have to rely on other people's takes:)
You could always go meta and watch a TV show with someone reading in it;)
River reads a story, surrounded by little injured children:
River: (sweet voice) "And the beautiful princess every night prayed for her handsome prince... "
River: (later, continuing) "... to fight through the terrible ivy of thorns and climb up to her room and slay all the wicked, evil demons... "
River: (much later, sweetly sing-songy) "And then the beautiful princess got tired of waiting for her handsome prince and tried to escape, but they found her and to punish her they locked her in a smelly, white, cold room where the evil blue demons strapped electrodes to her face and started to shock her. Zap, zap, zap, until she couldn't stop screaming. Only no one could hear."
(River remains smiling; the kids not so much. In fact, they're just a little bit freaked out by the story and by the freaky lady telling it)
Slashdot Mirror
1) Satellite networks already have inter-satellite communications. It's not new.
2) It's much easier than mesh networks on Earth. It's not an improvised network; you know exactly where every craft should be, down to incredibly fine accuracy, and they're all built specifically to operate with each other. And there's no random physical obstructions.
The last part is your error. It does not go to the "nearest ground station" to the user. It goes to the latency-weighted nearest ground station to the server which the satellite can reach. Furthermore, it's hopped directly into backbone traffic instead of filtering up through a progressive series of IPs. For example, if I traceroute anywhere out of Iceland, there's six hops within Iceland, then the traffic goes to London, then there's two hops, and then it hops onto a series of backbone routes to wherever it needs to go in the world, whether that's China, the US, elsewhere in Europe, etc. With the SpaceX constellation, the first 8 hops would disappear and be replaced by one hop through the satellite and one from the ground station to the most appropriate backbone; a single satellite could reach to North America, Europe, or North Asia from here.
You for some reason are assuming that the satellites have slow packet processing, or abnormal processing delays. Or perhaps you're mistakenly thinking that the physical distance traveled is longer? These are LEO satellites; for most traffic, it's shorter, as it doesn't involve snaking around the world wherever backbone lines happen to be laid.
Only a very small minority of traffic is routed satellite-to-satellite.
Wow, that totally makes you an expert on satellite communications, and makes you know more than SpaceX, Qualcomm, Samsung and Lockheed.
"When ground stations can't hear each other" - what do you mean by this? Are you referring to obstructions / interference with a given satellite? The receivers are phased-array (aka virtually instantly steered) antennas and there's always multiple satellites in the sky. The satellites have both satellite-to-satellite and satellite-to-ground communications. So data can be re-routed if there's need. That said, the internet gateways ground stations (unlike typical home receivers) will be positioned and laid out specifically with the intent of minimizing obstructions and interference, for obvious reasons.
OneWeb also exists (Virgin Group and Qualcomm). But they've hitched their horse to Blue Origin, so they better hope that Bezos pulls a rabbit out of a hat ;)
Indeed there are... in a given space. Which is why the satellites use narrow spot beams. Each beam from the lower planes targets only 52 square kilometers (a circle with a 4km radius), while the upper planes' beams are 550km^2 (a circle with a 13km radius).
While the satellites do direct satellite-to-satellite communications as well as satellite-to-ground, they're not designed to replace internet backbone services or major service provider connections; e.g. Google isn't going to be hosting its servers directly across the network. Rather, in addition to user terminals, there's also ground terminals ("gateways") that connect directly to internet backbones; the constellation is designed to provide "last leg" services. However, the distances between the user and the gateway that their data gets transmitted to can be very significant.
The SpaceX constellation is essentially global, and the intent is to undercut most global wired broadband connections on both speed and price; it'll be capable of up to 1Gbps per user, and the costs of the service will be spread around the globe. Previously this would have been unthinkable, but over the past decade there's been both a massive advance in satellite capabilities (per unit mass) and a massive reduction in launch costs (per unit payload mass). And it's all to be in LEO (nearly 12000 identical, mass-produced, mass-launched satellites), not GEO, so latencies are as low as or lower than traditional net service.
They may well pull it off. It's become so clear that such a service is now possible to implement that SpaceX's biggest problem is getting theirs in place before the competition; Samsung proposed such a constellation in 2015, and OneWeb (funded by Virgin Group and Qualcomm) is actively working toward one.
One interesting theory that's been batted around is that Teslas (and presumably other cars) will quickly switch over to it for their connectivity rather than relying on 4/5G service. You can't switch phones to it because the receiver is a phased array antenna about the size of a pizza box - but you can certainly have such a receiver in a car.
I have a lot to criticize Obama for on the foreign policy front. But the Status of Forces agreement (signed by Bush) between the US and Iraq ran out in June of 2009. A temporary extension was negotiated, but the Iraqi government refused to extend it past December 2011. What should the US have done to get to stay - overthrown the Iraqi government? The US was actively trying to extend their stay in Iraq.
That would have been quite the trick, given that Obama was elected to the US Senate in November of 2004, but the Iraq invasion started 20 March 2003, and the vote that enabled it passed in October 2002.
Barack Obama, Time Lord.
While he certainly couldn't have voted on the war in 2002, Barack Obama was, however, routinely speaking about it. Against it. Indeed, he was one of the main speakers at an anti-war rally in Chicago against the proposed bill, on 2 Oct 2002.
Yes, but they built their capitol on a Coal resource rather than a Wheat resource, and it's been coming back to haunt them.
They indeed have the richest deposits, but far from the only ones. It seems a lot of companies have been souring on Congo cobalt. They've done a pretty good job working to eliminate artisinal cobalt from their product streams (although there still are some less scrupulous buyers, and origins are sometimes successfully disguised), and a lot are worried about supply reliability. Which is why you've seen most of the new "cobalt rush" outside of the Congo.
Congo will continue being a major global supplier, but their share of the market will decline.
Thanks for letting me know - I'll welcome him whenever I see the chance.
There's one group that I'm quite glad we seemingly don't have as many of as other countries, and that's racists.
Corr to the above: 14*48=1764, not 126! That ups the final price to $4788, or $49/kWh.
That said... 9kg Li metal is probably an overestimate. And to reiterate, these are with inflated raw material prices.
Mostly hydro. And if you don't use it, you don't dam up our beautiful river canyons.
What gets me about all of the Icesave nonsense is all you had to do was click through to the terms - just 1-2 clicks from the front page of the website about Icesave accounts - and it listed the insurers. The #1 insurer was a private fund. The #2 insurer was the British government (in the UK; the Dutch government in the Netherlands). It was explicitly spelled out! And indeed, that's how it should have been according to banking regulations; private funds were perfectly acceptable as the primary insurer, and the country of the citizens purchasing the product is the secondary insurer. Of course, the private Icelandic banking fund went bankrupt in the crash, which passed the liability on to the secondary insurers (aka, the UK and Dutch governments). Who sued Iceland in the EFTA court, to try to get Iceland to take on their liabilities. And - I can't stress emphasis on this enough - lost on all counts.
Should banking regulations have allowed private funds to back accounts? Probably not. But they were what they were.
That's not to say that there weren't Icelanders who contributed to the crash - far from it. The level of criminality going on among top figures in the banking industry to deliberately prop up bad assets and make off like bandits was insane. But people here are as angry with them as people elsewhere, as they crashed our economy. Our currency literally got cut in half. Picture that, in a country where most goods are imported. Picture that, in a country where loans were generally denominated in foreign currencies. The 3 banks that went under had combined liabilities equal to half that of Lehmann Brothers... but in a country 1/1000th the population of the US. It was devastating.
And on top of that, we had the British trying to stick us with their liabilities and treating us as terrorists. You know, the UK - the country that spent decades stealing our fish and depleting our stocks. But hey, if you want your nets back, you can have them. ;)
Oh, and to give you an idea of what Icelanders generally think of planning ahead: there's a place near where I live where there's bridge piers in the middle of a fjörd, but no bridge. And no road, either. Where you'd need a road to connect to the hypothetical bridge, there's houses on one side and businesses on the other, blocking any way to access it. They started building the bridge, then just changed their mind and put neighborhoods and businesses instead, and then later built a different bridge further west.
Now, if that were a unique case that would be one thing. But it's not. Maybe 5-10 kilometers further north, they did it again. At least there's no houses blocking that one, but... they started building a bridge, and then just stopped.
But hey... (th)etta reddast...
Power prices are much lower here than in mainland Europe. So they'd rather sell to mainland Europe than here, until prices go up enough here to match mainland Europe.
For a minute I thought you were talking about the Icelandic króna ;)
Actually, most Icelanders are rather wary of that scheme. The big issue being that it will raise our power rates. It would be worth it if the revenue from those power sales would go to the general public (offsetting taxes), but we have way too much history with corporate dealmaking here to buy into such a story. The other issue is of course that it means a mass expansion of power generation infrastructure. If it were just wind and geo, I wouldn't have an issue, but (again, as history consistently tells) they'll just build giant dams, destroying our highlands one canyon at a time.
This article's title, BTW, that Iceland is "speculation shy"... if only it were true. Iceland is, and probably always will be, a country that goes through one bubble after the next, always hopping head-first into the next get-rich-quick scheme with little to no advance planning or caution. Not that there are parties (including the aforementioned Pirates, to which Smári belongs) who would take a more cautious, you-really-should-think-things-out approach. But so long as Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn gets in power - and they virtually always do - "due caution" will not be in the government's vocabulary. And there's all too many parties willing to go right along with them down the fast-money rabbit hole (Framsóknarflokkurinn, Miðflokkurinn, etc).
BTW, trivia: while "Smári" most commonly means "clover", it can also mean "transistor" - which I find ever-so-fitting for a Pirate MP. ;)
Please start with looking up what VAT stands for. Value Added Tax. At each stage where value is added to the product stream, VAT is levied. Are you saying that bitcoins are worth no more than the power? That the company is mining them for giggles?
If a company makes alumium, their alumium sales are taxed as well as them paying corporate taxes. It should be no different with bitcoin mining.
It's worth pointing out that modern NMC and NCA cells are only 15-20% cobalt in the cathodes - the cathodes in turn being only part of the cell mass, and the cells only being part of the pack mass. They keep working to push its percentage down, since it's the costliest element by mass. The bulk cathode material is nickel, which is already mined in bulk as a steel alloying agent. Last forecast I saw was that li-ions were only supposed to increase nickel demand 10-40% by 2025.
While some cobalt demand will be made up with new mines (it's historically not been worth spending much money in prospecting for it), a large chunk will simply be recovered by adding recovery circuits to existing mines, since cobalt can be found pretty much everywhere that a wide range of commonly mined metals are found (copper, silver, nickel, zinc, etc). At previous cobalt prices it wasn't worth amortizing the recovery hardware costs, so cobalt just went out in the tailings.
Thank you, I was about to write that same thing. That 60 kg figure must be carbonate, not metal.
The reversible lithium intercalation reaction between carbon and cobalt oxide is 11,2 kWh/kg. So for a Model 3 LR-sized LiCoO2/C battery, that's only 7kg of lithium. Of course, you have to increase that a bit because not all lithium will be available for intercalation at any given point of time. But that would strongly argue for 60 kg being carbonate, not metal.
This states that a 2Ah 18650 of the type Tesla uses in the Model S and X contain 0,6g of lithium (metal). Tesla's are 3285 mAh, so 0,975g per cell. At 4,2V per cell, that would be 0,0714 kg/kWh. So for a Model 3 LR-sized battery, that comes out to 6kg of lithium.
Let's be pessimistic and say 9kg of Li metal in a Model 3 LR. At 18,7% lithium, the carbonate equivalent is 48kg. And let's go with a price of $14/kg. That's $126 for the lithium. At 0,2kg cobalt per kWh, that's 16,1kg cobalt. At $80/kg, that's $1288. At a 5:1 nickel cobalt ratio, that's 1kg nickel per kWh. At $13/kg, that's $1046. Everything else in a pack is a mixture of alumium, manganese, organic electrolytes, carbon, silicon, copper wiring, a wide range of plastics, etc. Let's go with an average of $2/kg for the remainder. Tesla's Model 3 LR packs (not individual cells) are (roughly) rated by the EPA at 150Wh/kg. That comes out to 537kg. The other way we can analyze it is compare the 80,5kWh LR pack to the 80,5*31/46=54,25kWh SR pack (26,25kWh difference) and the 121kg difference between packs, which would suggest 371kg. Let's go with 450kg. So ~345kg that's not nickel/cobalt/lithium, or $690. Summing it all up: $3150 of raw materials. Or $39 per kWh.
$39/kWh while demand is outpacing supply. Even less when prices return to their historic levels.
Battery packs are, and will continue to be for the time being, limited by production costs, not raw material costs. Hence the reason why first Tesla - and now everyone - has pursued the strategy of "go big".
That's perfectly normal usage. It's weird that you'd focus on that aspect and not on the fact that Nikola is a company running purely on hype and without anywhere near the funding to achieve what they want to, nor the fact that none of their numbers actually add up. Or the fact that they keep changing their business model once or twice a year.
I'm not sure what bad experience you had with Autopilot, but it doesn't match my experience at all. Or those of all of the pages that turn up when you google comparisons between Autopilot and ProPilot (I can't personally compare as I've never driven a ProPilot car). But, I'll try ProPilot myself when I get the chance so I don't just have to rely on other people's takes :)
What, are you afraid that Disney will get ahold of the rights to Firefly or something? ;)
You're a very "up" person.
You could always go meta and watch a TV show with someone reading in it ;)