No, it would be more like you put the dollar into a billfold, then took out 10... put one back in, got another 10 out... and then did this for weeks. At some point you have to think to yourself "Ok, either this really is a magic billfold, or he is very good packing dollars into wallets.
Or... he's using slight-of-hand tricks to make me think he's a) only putting one dollar in, b) that there really were 10 coming out, and c) that the 10 came out of the wallet.
[Watch Teller (of Penn and Teller) create an unlimited number of coins from nothing and put them in a small metal bucket.]
And, by an amazing coincidence, these are the things that people are questioning about Rossi's device and this "analysis". A) Was the input power properly measured (no), B) was the output properly measured (no), and C) were other (conventional but hidden) sources of input energy properly excluded (no).
Read it again, that $400k is just the first year. Then $800k, then $1.6m, then $3.2m... Until he's made his billions of dollars.
If you are capable of making the first plant (as Rossi did), you are capable of earning enough income from it to make the second, and so on, until you've made enough money to sate your appetite and decide to just give the design away. But it's better than that, because if you are actually selling electricity, not magic beans, it makes your magic beans a hell of a lot more credible. [For example, Rossi claimed (early on) that he was using his device to heat his "factory", precisely to give himself that kind of credibility.]
Can't get on the grid due to {conspiracy}. No problem. You sell on-site off-grid power to individual large customers, if you can cut their power costs they'd jump at the chance. Aluminium smelters spend a fortune on electricity, mining companies spend a fortune on fuel for remote power generation... (That said, you might pick one or two clients as demonstrators and offer them free power. That also lets you work out the bugs in the system before you have contractual obligations.) A decade later, you're powering everything from Google server farms to the International Space Station. And at that point, if you are not wealthy enough to get a licence to build grid-connected plants in any market that has commercial power, you're doing it wrong.
But there's even more money to be made. In the paper, the isotopic composition of the post-experiment "ash" from his ecats included several isotopes that are extremely valuable in their own right ($20k/oz.) There's one that is a beta-emitter that (if it could be produced cheaply) would power compact "nuclear batteries" for anything from laptops to space probes, for applications too small for the ecat-based system. [At least one lithium isotope is "dual use", so selling that requires some extra paper-work. But others are no harder than selling smoke-detectors.]
Right now he could not only be selling power, but also be selling rare isotopes, and developing other product lines not directly connected with the ecats made from the "ash" of his power plants. (And the good thing about the beta-voltaic battery is that not only are the fairly simple, the technology is off-patent. Doesn't matter if someone reverse-engineers your design, unless they have a source of cheap beta-emitter. So you can sell the "batteries" wherever you can get appropriate licensing, without worrying about IP theft.)
And every one of these things does more to demonstrate the reality of his device than getting a few gullible patsies to write stare at a glowing rod for 30 hours.
Two words: Manhattan Project. Government was able to keep that under wraps for as long as was needed.
For about three years? With the program itself being hidden at remote locations, out of public view, during a war. With every American, every journalist, who accidentally stumbled onto the program being easily convinced to keep the secret "from those sneaky Krauts."
And a program which was for the country, for the common defence, doing something that they believed in. (Either out of loyalty to the US, fear of Nazis, or just because they were giant nerds playing with nuclear fire.) And since then, many of those scientists changed their loyalties and joined the anti-nuclear movement. (And pretty much everything that could leak, in the 60 years since then, has leaked.)
A moon landing hoax would have been the opposite. It would betray their own people, betray their friends at NASA, betray their own beliefs and morality, and they didn't get to go to the moon. For what? Why keep that secret for decade after decade after decade...?
So, the government is too inept to pull off a hoax of this magnitude, but actually performing the real feat was within its scope of capabilities?
They still had to build the giant rocket and land something on the moon in order for the telemetry to work. So they had all the complexity of building Saturn V and the Apollo stack but in addition they had to seamlessly pull off the greatest hoax in history with the greatest concentration of pedantic nerd geniuses in the world watching.
Apollo succeeded in spite of its failures. The Apollo 1 fire, the Apollo 13 explosion. Apollo 12's repeated lightning strikes and then the astronauts destroying their only video camera, etc etc. All with thousands of experts watching over them. Going back to the various cluster-fucks during Mercury and Gemini when they were trying to learn EVAs and later docking; but they could keep trying until they got it right. And once it was done, it was done. It didn't matter if new people came in and went through the archives, didn't matter if people looked at the hardware. There was nothing to hide.
A giant conspiracy to fake the moon landings had to get everything right the first time, with a skeleton crew, and it was not only vulnerable to a single major leak or screw-up at the time, it has continued to be vulnerable for 50 years. The hoaxers can never stop the cover-up.
For example, the LRO imaged the Apollo landing sites, showing tracks and vehicles. Was that faked? A brand new cover-up during the LRO program, adding a whole new conspiracy they had to seamlessly pull of under the noses of the LRO science team, and then keep secret forever.
And each layer of cover-up adds more things to go wrong, more people able to leak now or in the future. With every single person involved, every astronaut and technician, knowing that they are sitting on the greatest secret in history. It just needs one person, diagnosed with terminal cancer, conscience, or greed, to say, "Fuck it..."
You can buy LED strips (and fancier kits) to stick behind your TV/monitor to create a coloured glow on the wall around your screen which extends the edges of the images to create a greater immersion.
Given that screen-size is the limiting factor in these VR headsets, are any of the manufacturers including this kind of ultra-simple peripheral lighting within the headset? To reduce the blinker effect from the limited FOV.
TV/monitor kits can only use the regular image and extrapolate the edge effects. But with a VR kit, the content developers themselves would be able to program peripheral lighting in addition to the monitor image. So an object could appear in your peripheral vision before it reaches the edge of the actual screen. Similarly, small and large objects would show differences in the peripheral lighting even though both have the same size on the screen. Both effects increasing the immersion. (And, of course, in horror games, the devs would use it to just fuck with you.)
IMO, with a peripheral lighting system, a screen with a mere 90 FOV would be plenty for full immersion. It's rare that you pivot your eyes beyond 45 without turning your head. You flick your eyes across, then turn your head to re-centre your vision. And when you do that, your eyes don't have long enough to focus on the object (to extract detail) before your head movement has caught up, so under normal circumstances you still shouldn't notice the extremely low resolution of the peripheral lighting.
[Disclaimer: I ain't even got a Nintendo Virtual Boy, so maybe modern VR devices all do this, but I can't find any reference to it online except a single 5 year old forum post.]
There are ways for sites to include advertising without surrendering their site to third-party-hosted malware. Many ways which aren't even blocked by adblockers by default. It's a bit more work for them than just using doubleclick/etc, but it's worth it.
So you're really saying that all the stupid/lazy sites will die off or retire behind paywalls. Surely that's "mission fucking accomplished."
(I'm constantly amazed that newspaper and TV-network sites mindless use doubleclick/etc for their websites, even though they have large advertising/marketing departments for their non-web products. You are already paying for an ad department! You already have a network of advertisers! You already have their actual ad-content on file! Why are you giving money to another company to do what you already do yourself and have done for over half a century?)
No. Digital content needs to be worked. Digital archives are a certain path to unreadable formats, corrupted files, failed electronics, etc. It's different with archiving paper/film/etc, where constant handling reduces lifespan and data decays in a "human friendly" way. USBs, harddrives, DVDs, all shitty archive material unless they are being constantly used (and thus checked) and copied and themselves backed up.
Even with a archive folder(s) on an active drive, every few years you need to check that the formats are still readable, and that the player/editor software still works on your current system and/or that newer player/editors play the older files. And periodically convert the data to newer formats (by all means keep the old to avoid lossy conversion to short lifespan formats.) And it all gets backed up with your normal backup regime, which itself is a system that gets periodically updated because it's in regular use.
I'm not saying "It should be", or "I expect", I'm saying it's already been decided: unless the law gets changed, the FAA will be the regulator of private manned spaceflight.
NASA hasn't incrementally developed spacecraft for decades. Their obsession with one-off throw-away designs is a major annoyance of mine.
So the topic was human vs robotic. And it's clear that removing the human element has done nothing to reduce the cost of programs like JWST. On the contrary, it's blown the cost out by over 300%.
Step-wise, incremental development would lower costs no matter what program you are talking about, manned or unmanned.
neither the government nor either company could afford that. NASA has to pick one and fund it.
Can you explain the logic behind that?
If the launches are fixed price, it costs NASA a fixed price per-launch whether they have one vendor or ten. If one vendor (say, Boeing) can't compete, they'll drop out and their launches will go to other vendors who can.
Dropping back to a single vendor on a cost-plus contract is the most expensive option.
OTOH, the cost of JWST has blown out even further than Hubble (approx $9b, from an initial budget below $2b) precisely because there's no human servicing, which means everything in the overly-complex design must deploy perfectly or the entire mission is a bust. Eliminating the added cost of making the spacecraft serviceable is more than made up for by making the need to ensure the spacecraft can't fail.
So "the science guys" aren't a guarantee of savings, once a robotic mission becomes the flagship program and everyone tries to latch on to the teat to fund their idiotic ideas.
The problem with HSF at NASA is the legacy of Apollo, the hundred thousand employees and contractors, the scattered NASA centres and even more scattered contractor networks, which all make HSF unaffordable. (For example, the annual cost of the Shuttle program was the same regardless of how many missions they flew that year, 6, 4, 2 or none. The annual budget for operating the completed ISS is, by amazing coincidence, exactly the same as the annual budget during the construction, which was by yet another amazing coincidence, exactly the same as the annual budget during the last four years of development.)
By developing private human space-flight, we can reduce the cost of doing on-orbit repairs until it's cheaper to send humans to fix something than to write off the spacecraft and send up a new one.
How would SpaceX man-rate Dragon if they aren't selected by NASA given that man-rating space vehicles has always been done by NASA?
It's been done by NASA because NASA was the only body in the US flying humans into space.
Private spaceflight will be regulated by the FAA.
[Looking at FAA's rules for sub-orbital flights, it looks like they are going hands-off initially. Once there are enough commercial HSF accidents to find patterns, they'll start to add rules to eliminate some of the worst cowboy practices. (Same as happened for commercial air travel.)]
Also, SpaceX is trying to commercialise their systems. Boeing has no interest in anything except the NASA contract. That means that, if Bigelow achieves their goal, SpaceX will not only be flying to ISS, but also to private Bigelow stations. That's a secondary career for astronauts, and an alternative career path for NASA's astronaut-candidates who didn't make the cut.
And for that reason, there's nothing "safe" about choosing Boeing's capsule. That's just spin from Boeing's own PR pukes lobbying for funding. Boeing is the furthest behind of the three main participants. It is the most expensive. It will have the least flight time. It will have no upgrade path, and every development will need to be funded entirely by NASA, at increasing costs as it mutates back into a cost-plus program. Boeing has put it none of its own funding into the project, unlike every other participant, and has been lobbying behind the scenes to remove the current Commercial Crew NASA team and replace them with a traditional NASA cost-plus management structure.
Boeing is poison for Commercial Crew, a cuckoo in the nest. The sooner they are excluded from the program, the better.
The car will react about half a second faster than you. Which, at 65mph, allows it to stop a full 50 feet earlier than you. It will also brake with full ABS, whereas you will tend to brake timidly at first for another half second before panic braking, which probably saves the car another 30-50 feet.
So it will generally avoid the entire situation that would require moral judgements over orphans versus self. Situations where it must swerve to avoid a collision are ones that occur too close to the car for you, human, to have even reacted to.
You misunderstand. I'm not saying you won't get "economy plus" if you pay for "economy plus", or "business" if you pay for "business". I'm saying that there's no guarantee what that means. Show me on your ticket where it says "minimum 34 inch seat-pitch guaranteed".
I'm saying if you look at the price of two airline tickets for the same class on the same route, one is $500, one is $550, which one has the most legroom? The $550? Not necessarily. There's no information given by the airlines on what sized seat you are buying which allows you to compare. Your original comment said, paraphrasing, blamed the consumers for buying the cheapest option, but the airlines don't give the information I need to chose between them. How do consumers influence the quality of a product if they can't differentiate between products before buying?
In reality, most casual fliers actually over-pay for their tickets because it's so difficult to untangle pricing information, even without getting into differences in seats sizes between different airlines, different aircraft within an airline, different seats within an aircraft. I'm a book-keeper and finding the best value ticket for a given trip is harder than filing my employer's monthly payroll taxes and employee superannuation. Airlines have made an art of obfuscation.
[It is possible to work it out using third party sites, but trying to use them to compare, say, three airlines on a particular route based on price-versus-seat-pitch is extremely difficult. There's no easy comparison system to say "I want to go from A to B, over this approx period, what is the price/seat-size comparison across all airlines?"
There are local airlines where the pitch of "Premium economy" (economy plus) seating is the same as another airline's more expensive "Business" class seats, if they fly the right model aircraft on that route, on that day. If they fly a slightly different model, their "Premium economy" seats are shorter than the "Basic economy" seats on the first airline. Four inch variation between aircraft.]]
Slashdot Mirror
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
No, it would be more like you put the dollar into a billfold, then took out 10... put one back in, got another 10 out... and then did this for weeks. At some point you have to think to yourself "Ok, either this really is a magic billfold, or he is very good packing dollars into wallets.
Or... he's using slight-of-hand tricks to make me think he's a) only putting one dollar in, b) that there really were 10 coming out, and c) that the 10 came out of the wallet.
[Watch Teller (of Penn and Teller) create an unlimited number of coins from nothing and put them in a small metal bucket.]
And, by an amazing coincidence, these are the things that people are questioning about Rossi's device and this "analysis". A) Was the input power properly measured (no), B) was the output properly measured (no), and C) were other (conventional but hidden) sources of input energy properly excluded (no).
Read it again, that $400k is just the first year. Then $800k, then $1.6m, then $3.2m... Until he's made his billions of dollars.
If you are capable of making the first plant (as Rossi did), you are capable of earning enough income from it to make the second, and so on, until you've made enough money to sate your appetite and decide to just give the design away. But it's better than that, because if you are actually selling electricity, not magic beans, it makes your magic beans a hell of a lot more credible. [For example, Rossi claimed (early on) that he was using his device to heat his "factory", precisely to give himself that kind of credibility.]
Can't get on the grid due to {conspiracy}. No problem. You sell on-site off-grid power to individual large customers, if you can cut their power costs they'd jump at the chance. Aluminium smelters spend a fortune on electricity, mining companies spend a fortune on fuel for remote power generation... (That said, you might pick one or two clients as demonstrators and offer them free power. That also lets you work out the bugs in the system before you have contractual obligations.) A decade later, you're powering everything from Google server farms to the International Space Station. And at that point, if you are not wealthy enough to get a licence to build grid-connected plants in any market that has commercial power, you're doing it wrong.
But there's even more money to be made. In the paper, the isotopic composition of the post-experiment "ash" from his ecats included several isotopes that are extremely valuable in their own right ($20k/oz.) There's one that is a beta-emitter that (if it could be produced cheaply) would power compact "nuclear batteries" for anything from laptops to space probes, for applications too small for the ecat-based system. [At least one lithium isotope is "dual use", so selling that requires some extra paper-work. But others are no harder than selling smoke-detectors.]
Right now he could not only be selling power, but also be selling rare isotopes, and developing other product lines not directly connected with the ecats made from the "ash" of his power plants. (And the good thing about the beta-voltaic battery is that not only are the fairly simple, the technology is off-patent. Doesn't matter if someone reverse-engineers your design, unless they have a source of cheap beta-emitter. So you can sell the "batteries" wherever you can get appropriate licensing, without worrying about IP theft.)
And every one of these things does more to demonstrate the reality of his device than getting a few gullible patsies to write stare at a glowing rod for 30 hours.
Ten!
Eight!
Seven!
Vista!
XP!
2000!
ME!
98!
95!
3.11
3
2
1
DOS!
We have DOS of the Microsoft operating system. The processor is at 16 bit, and 86-DOS has cloned the CP/M.
Unlike the shit I flush into the same system?
Pretty sure that article was a hoax.
Two words: Manhattan Project. Government was able to keep that under wraps for as long as was needed.
For about three years? With the program itself being hidden at remote locations, out of public view, during a war. With every American, every journalist, who accidentally stumbled onto the program being easily convinced to keep the secret "from those sneaky Krauts."
And a program which was for the country, for the common defence, doing something that they believed in. (Either out of loyalty to the US, fear of Nazis, or just because they were giant nerds playing with nuclear fire.) And since then, many of those scientists changed their loyalties and joined the anti-nuclear movement. (And pretty much everything that could leak, in the 60 years since then, has leaked.)
A moon landing hoax would have been the opposite. It would betray their own people, betray their friends at NASA, betray their own beliefs and morality, and they didn't get to go to the moon. For what? Why keep that secret for decade after decade after decade...?
So, the government is too inept to pull off a hoax of this magnitude, but actually performing the real feat was within its scope of capabilities?
They still had to build the giant rocket and land something on the moon in order for the telemetry to work. So they had all the complexity of building Saturn V and the Apollo stack but in addition they had to seamlessly pull off the greatest hoax in history with the greatest concentration of pedantic nerd geniuses in the world watching.
Apollo succeeded in spite of its failures. The Apollo 1 fire, the Apollo 13 explosion. Apollo 12's repeated lightning strikes and then the astronauts destroying their only video camera, etc etc. All with thousands of experts watching over them. Going back to the various cluster-fucks during Mercury and Gemini when they were trying to learn EVAs and later docking; but they could keep trying until they got it right. And once it was done, it was done. It didn't matter if new people came in and went through the archives, didn't matter if people looked at the hardware. There was nothing to hide.
A giant conspiracy to fake the moon landings had to get everything right the first time, with a skeleton crew, and it was not only vulnerable to a single major leak or screw-up at the time, it has continued to be vulnerable for 50 years. The hoaxers can never stop the cover-up.
For example, the LRO imaged the Apollo landing sites, showing tracks and vehicles. Was that faked? A brand new cover-up during the LRO program, adding a whole new conspiracy they had to seamlessly pull of under the noses of the LRO science team, and then keep secret forever.
And each layer of cover-up adds more things to go wrong, more people able to leak now or in the future. With every single person involved, every astronaut and technician, knowing that they are sitting on the greatest secret in history. It just needs one person, diagnosed with terminal cancer, conscience, or greed, to say, "Fuck it..."
You can buy LED strips (and fancier kits) to stick behind your TV/monitor to create a coloured glow on the wall around your screen which extends the edges of the images to create a greater immersion.
Given that screen-size is the limiting factor in these VR headsets, are any of the manufacturers including this kind of ultra-simple peripheral lighting within the headset? To reduce the blinker effect from the limited FOV.
TV/monitor kits can only use the regular image and extrapolate the edge effects. But with a VR kit, the content developers themselves would be able to program peripheral lighting in addition to the monitor image. So an object could appear in your peripheral vision before it reaches the edge of the actual screen. Similarly, small and large objects would show differences in the peripheral lighting even though both have the same size on the screen. Both effects increasing the immersion. (And, of course, in horror games, the devs would use it to just fuck with you.)
IMO, with a peripheral lighting system, a screen with a mere 90 FOV would be plenty for full immersion. It's rare that you pivot your eyes beyond 45 without turning your head. You flick your eyes across, then turn your head to re-centre your vision. And when you do that, your eyes don't have long enough to focus on the object (to extract detail) before your head movement has caught up, so under normal circumstances you still shouldn't notice the extremely low resolution of the peripheral lighting.
[Disclaimer: I ain't even got a Nintendo Virtual Boy, so maybe modern VR devices all do this, but I can't find any reference to it online except a single 5 year old forum post.]
Now where does this system put a camera over each eye?
Directly in front of each display, so it's in line with the eyes. Bring up any image of the front of the device and they're right fucking there.
Such as the linked article.
Poster seems to be confused about what a camera and what a display is.
Someone certainly is.
ads != doubleclick.
There are ways for sites to include advertising without surrendering their site to third-party-hosted malware. Many ways which aren't even blocked by adblockers by default. It's a bit more work for them than just using doubleclick/etc, but it's worth it.
So you're really saying that all the stupid/lazy sites will die off or retire behind paywalls. Surely that's "mission fucking accomplished."
(I'm constantly amazed that newspaper and TV-network sites mindless use doubleclick/etc for their websites, even though they have large advertising/marketing departments for their non-web products. You are already paying for an ad department! You already have a network of advertisers! You already have their actual ad-content on file! Why are you giving money to another company to do what you already do yourself and have done for over half a century?)
But the stuff that is needed one day is worth all the pain of keeping the rest. The problem is not knowing.
The videos are so you have something to cut together for their funeral video.
The newspapers are so the great grandkids have something for their 3rd grade social studies project.
Neither did video tape.
No. Digital content needs to be worked. Digital archives are a certain path to unreadable formats, corrupted files, failed electronics, etc. It's different with archiving paper/film/etc, where constant handling reduces lifespan and data decays in a "human friendly" way. USBs, harddrives, DVDs, all shitty archive material unless they are being constantly used (and thus checked) and copied and themselves backed up.
Even with a archive folder(s) on an active drive, every few years you need to check that the formats are still readable, and that the player/editor software still works on your current system and/or that newer player/editors play the older files. And periodically convert the data to newer formats (by all means keep the old to avoid lossy conversion to short lifespan formats.) And it all gets backed up with your normal backup regime, which itself is a system that gets periodically updated because it's in regular use.
I'm not saying "It should be", or "I expect", I'm saying it's already been decided: unless the law gets changed, the FAA will be the regulator of private manned spaceflight.
NASA hasn't incrementally developed spacecraft for decades. Their obsession with one-off throw-away designs is a major annoyance of mine.
So the topic was human vs robotic. And it's clear that removing the human element has done nothing to reduce the cost of programs like JWST. On the contrary, it's blown the cost out by over 300%.
Step-wise, incremental development would lower costs no matter what program you are talking about, manned or unmanned.
neither the government nor either company could afford that. NASA has to pick one and fund it.
Can you explain the logic behind that?
If the launches are fixed price, it costs NASA a fixed price per-launch whether they have one vendor or ten. If one vendor (say, Boeing) can't compete, they'll drop out and their launches will go to other vendors who can.
Dropping back to a single vendor on a cost-plus contract is the most expensive option.
OTOH, the cost of JWST has blown out even further than Hubble (approx $9b, from an initial budget below $2b) precisely because there's no human servicing, which means everything in the overly-complex design must deploy perfectly or the entire mission is a bust. Eliminating the added cost of making the spacecraft serviceable is more than made up for by making the need to ensure the spacecraft can't fail.
So "the science guys" aren't a guarantee of savings, once a robotic mission becomes the flagship program and everyone tries to latch on to the teat to fund their idiotic ideas.
The problem with HSF at NASA is the legacy of Apollo, the hundred thousand employees and contractors, the scattered NASA centres and even more scattered contractor networks, which all make HSF unaffordable. (For example, the annual cost of the Shuttle program was the same regardless of how many missions they flew that year, 6, 4, 2 or none. The annual budget for operating the completed ISS is, by amazing coincidence, exactly the same as the annual budget during the construction, which was by yet another amazing coincidence, exactly the same as the annual budget during the last four years of development.)
By developing private human space-flight, we can reduce the cost of doing on-orbit repairs until it's cheaper to send humans to fix something than to write off the spacecraft and send up a new one.
How would SpaceX man-rate Dragon if they aren't selected by NASA given that man-rating space vehicles has always been done by NASA?
It's been done by NASA because NASA was the only body in the US flying humans into space.
Private spaceflight will be regulated by the FAA.
[Looking at FAA's rules for sub-orbital flights, it looks like they are going hands-off initially. Once there are enough commercial HSF accidents to find patterns, they'll start to add rules to eliminate some of the worst cowboy practices. (Same as happened for commercial air travel.)]
Also, SpaceX is trying to commercialise their systems. Boeing has no interest in anything except the NASA contract. That means that, if Bigelow achieves their goal, SpaceX will not only be flying to ISS, but also to private Bigelow stations. That's a secondary career for astronauts, and an alternative career path for NASA's astronaut-candidates who didn't make the cut.
And for that reason, there's nothing "safe" about choosing Boeing's capsule. That's just spin from Boeing's own PR pukes lobbying for funding. Boeing is the furthest behind of the three main participants. It is the most expensive. It will have the least flight time. It will have no upgrade path, and every development will need to be funded entirely by NASA, at increasing costs as it mutates back into a cost-plus program. Boeing has put it none of its own funding into the project, unlike every other participant, and has been lobbying behind the scenes to remove the current Commercial Crew NASA team and replace them with a traditional NASA cost-plus management structure.
Boeing is poison for Commercial Crew, a cuckoo in the nest. The sooner they are excluded from the program, the better.
Astronauts, while edible, are not pies.
"The 2017 Cadillac model will feature Super Cruise technology."
O_o
The car will react about half a second faster than you. Which, at 65mph, allows it to stop a full 50 feet earlier than you. It will also brake with full ABS, whereas you will tend to brake timidly at first for another half second before panic braking, which probably saves the car another 30-50 feet.
So it will generally avoid the entire situation that would require moral judgements over orphans versus self. Situations where it must swerve to avoid a collision are ones that occur too close to the car for you, human, to have even reacted to.
You misunderstand. I'm not saying you won't get "economy plus" if you pay for "economy plus", or "business" if you pay for "business". I'm saying that there's no guarantee what that means. Show me on your ticket where it says "minimum 34 inch seat-pitch guaranteed".
I'm saying if you look at the price of two airline tickets for the same class on the same route, one is $500, one is $550, which one has the most legroom? The $550? Not necessarily. There's no information given by the airlines on what sized seat you are buying which allows you to compare. Your original comment said, paraphrasing, blamed the consumers for buying the cheapest option, but the airlines don't give the information I need to chose between them. How do consumers influence the quality of a product if they can't differentiate between products before buying?
In reality, most casual fliers actually over-pay for their tickets because it's so difficult to untangle pricing information, even without getting into differences in seats sizes between different airlines, different aircraft within an airline, different seats within an aircraft. I'm a book-keeper and finding the best value ticket for a given trip is harder than filing my employer's monthly payroll taxes and employee superannuation. Airlines have made an art of obfuscation.
[It is possible to work it out using third party sites, but trying to use them to compare, say, three airlines on a particular route based on price-versus-seat-pitch is extremely difficult. There's no easy comparison system to say "I want to go from A to B, over this approx period, what is the price/seat-size comparison across all airlines?"
There are local airlines where the pitch of "Premium economy" (economy plus) seating is the same as another airline's more expensive "Business" class seats, if they fly the right model aircraft on that route, on that day. If they fly a slightly different model, their "Premium economy" seats are shorter than the "Basic economy" seats on the first airline. Four inch variation between aircraft.]]