I'd have thought they'd use mild or full hybridization, or even just more advanced actually clean diesels, at least as a transition.
NOBODY will believe VW when they announce they've got a new, clean diesel. In addition, European countries are announcing future, across-the-board bans on diesels, because the soot they produce is so damaging to health and structures. There's no future in diesel cars, and spending any more money on developing a BETTER dead-end technology is foolish. You might as well tell Kodak to make a slightly cheaper film camera, as digital cameras loom large.
Imagine NYC if the sound of engines were taken away.
Engines only contribute about 1/3rd of the noise of a vehicle. Air being pushed out from between the wheels and pavement counts for most of the rest. EVs will help a bit, but wont fix the problem.
We arent even close to the limits of lossy compression
Completely wrong.
MPEG-2 video and audio come very close to the limits of accurate lossy compression... Specifically, much-higher compression, that does not discard perceptible information (as shown by professional ABX testing) is not possible. This has been matemtatically proven, the term is "Perceptual Entropy" and it sets the upper limits based on physiological models of human senses, established in the late 80s/early 90s most significantly by J.D Johnston of ATT Bell Labs.
That's why nobody is trying to improve upon perfect lossless compression anymore. Instead newer codecs willfully discard perceptible information, but try to generate an output that just looks/sounds "good" but is easily distinguished from the source. That's why only MUSHRA tests are popular today, modern codecs (at common/recomended bitrates) would completely fail professional ABX testing.
America tried an almost completely unregulated free market. It gave us the "robber barons" who monopolized incredible wealth for themselves, and used it to either buy-up or destroy all competitors by cutting them off from their markets. Industrialists who would hire private armies to MURDER union organizers rather than risk increasing labor costs. A state of affairs which eventually caused a little thing called the "great depression" which nearly caused a peasant revolt that would have destroyed this country.
If I round up, it makes the game look better than it is. If I round down, I am being giving an inaccurate portray of how I really feel.
You are but one drop of rain in a monsoon. Ratings *should* appropriately dither over the aggregate, so the few who are in the middle will likely half vote up, while half vote down.
While up/down may not be entirely fair, there's really more options for manipulation in a star rating system. By removing zero-star ratings as an option, they can artificially inflate scores. By changing the textual labels (what if 4-stars was described as "Just Okay"?) they can manipulate people into rating higher. And in general, companies are biased to WANT higher ratings, so you'll be more likely to stay around longer, spending more money, so whatever system they design is going to err or the high side.
You know what ALWAYS comes after a merger? Massive lay-offs. There's no reason to merge two companies if they have just as high costs as when they were operating separately, so eliminating now-redundant jobs is the key reason mergers happen. Approving that is going to make Trump look very, very bad.
The merger was always an idiotic idea... Sprint and T-Mobile have no technology in common, nor do their services complement each other in ANY way... Nearly all the company's towers are deployed in proximity to the other's, so they're redundant and most would just have to go. At best, it would be like the MetroPCS buyout... T-Mobile would be buying the brand, stores, and customers, telling them all they need to replace their phones in short order, and shutting off the foreign network they don't want or need to bother maintaining. It really only serves as a legal way to kill-off a competitor.
Of course Sprint just LOVES idiotic ideas. Nextel, WiMax, Clearwire, Tidal, etc. The more obviously idiot the idea, the quicker Sprint is going to jump at it, so they can start burning money even faster.
They clearly think a merger with T-Mobile is a foregone conclusion, because they've completely given-up on improving their network. They announce upgrades, then cut the budget to not just a fraction of what they need to catch-up, but a fraction of what is needed to just maintain parity and avoid falling further behind their competitors. So Sprint's network keeps getting slower and slower.
Some people have been saying it looks like SoftBank is spinning all their valuable assets off to subsidiaries that they control, but which aren't under Sprint, so as the company fails from the lack of investment, the other investors will get nothing, while SoftBank gets to keep or sell-off everything of value. But I believe it's just more of a delaying strategy... Keep Sprint limping along, but perpetually on the edge of failure, in hopes regulators will fear a (too big to fail) bankruptcy, and go along with a merger no matter how bad it looks for every one of the stakeholders involved.
SoftBank made an idiotic investment. Sprint is worth rescuing, but they aren't interested or particularly capable of doing it. They deserve to lose their shirt. Then sell the company to somebody who's actually going to try to build it back up into a viable and competitive cellular carrier again.
Except he's 100% correct that such an order would exceed the authority of the FCC. Congress could do it, but the FCC cannot. And you should be THANKFUL for that fact, otherwise ATSC/HDTV tuners would all implement the "broadcast flag" and DVRs would be all but illegal. How soon we forget.
Neonicotinoids are not particularly persistent. They are already banned in much of Europe.
Right. And yet Europe is experiencing colony collapse disorder as well. The evidence that neonicotinoids have any contributing effect to CCD is... very weak, at best.
Yes indeed, I've been using the basic HTML GMail interface for years now, never liking their slow JS version that blocks every time you click on anything.
Mozilla refused to support h.264 for years - even after it was clear that standard had won the web streaming format war.
H.264 won because Apple belligerently refuse to even ALLOW WebM add-ons in its products. Having Firefox as a stubborn opponent, rather than pragmatically giving-in every time there's the slightest pressure to do so, is immensely useful, and simply the right thing for the public, even if users are briefly inconvenienced.
What..the fuck kind of news for nerds is this gossipy whining?
This site hasn't called itself "News for Nerds" in quite a few years now. Just look around and try to find that tag-line... It's long gone.
It's been one non-stop decline ever since the "Politics" section was created. First Sourceforge, then Dice, and now BizX have had no interest in the site's origins or credibility, and are only interested in the large audience they can abuse to drive-up ad impressions. Even clicking through to complain about what a shithole this place has become, is PROFIT for them, so they will keep it up. The trolls are profit, the paid shills are profit, the flood of crap on the front-page that has people yelling at their screen is profit for them. And that's the only thing they care about.
Sure the audience has continued declining, sure this place is a joke, sure in the long-term it's an increasingly less valuable property for the change, but they're going to cash-out as much as they can, as soon as they can, and not worry one bit about the smoldering ruin that's left.
People like you are EXACTLY why I refuse to disclose my salary.
Just because you're paying $10k more than my current position, you think I'll jump at the chance, even though it's twice as much work, in a much higher-rent area, etc, etc. So much so, that many companies won't be bothered even spending five minutes explaining the job better than the vague listing.
Or because you're paying $10k less, you think there's no way I'll take the job, and not bother explaining how nice a work environment it is, how many perks there are, opportunities for personal and professional growth, etc.
There's no reason I should have to explain my last salary to you. It has no affect on how valuable I will be to your company. You're a fool to believe it gives you useful information in the first place. If I was less honest, I'd just lie about it, since you can't reliably verify it (and I've never seen anybody even try). That's what many companies are doing, ensuring you only ever hire liars for all positions. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Even worse are the companies who cap annual raises at 3%. That ensures even the best performers only break-even vs inflation, while everyone else is getting annual pay cuts... A great way to send turnover through the roof, and your company into a sinking ship.
Specifically, Google Fiber is not a loss. Accountants put it on the books as a loss, but it's not. It's just an expensive investment in physical plant with a long payoff period. It may takes years, even decades, but it's not like people are going to stop using this new-fangled thing called the Internet.
I've canceled my cable internet and switched to cellular. I have FIOS in my area, too, but there's more competition in cellular, so us lighter users (not streaming Netflix) can get a better deal. It shouldn't be this way... DSL used to be dirt cheap, and some cable companies even had $15/mo plans, but reduced regulation in the US over many years has eliminated those cheaper options across most of the country. They've held the line better on cellular competition, but I'm concerned that won't last much longer, either.
In any case, Google Fiber isn't an internet monopoly ANYWHERE it operates. Saying it's guaranteed to profit is idiotic... There are always a half dozen competitors around who can undercut Google and steal their fiber customers. Your underpants gnome understanding of economics falls short. When you've got a few million to waste, build your own ISP and get back to us.
Even while people are cord cutting their cable TV, a smaller number are cutting their internet service, too:
So what this stat means is that it takes 110x more people to generate each kWh of electricity with solar than with fossil fuels. If anything, this is an excellent argument for not using solar to generate electricity.
Not at all. You're only ASSUMING that the additional jobs equates to significantly more expense. But you don't have to make that logical leap... we have actual price figures allowing direct comparison, which show that not to be the case.
So we have cheap electricity that generates many more jobs. That might mean less profit for the investors, but a net positive for society.
I've got a few cameras that require a crappy Internet Explorer only configuration "web" interface
I've seen several that require IE for in-browser AUDIO, but that's all. Every camera I've purchased can do configuration and video with any browser, and you can do audio with native apps on any platform (just not in-browser), going all the way back to Axis cameras just shy of two decades ago.
In fact, it seems ALL network cameras made today support ONVIF, so there's a compatible standard they all support (though maybe not in your browser of choice). There's nothing unreliable about any of them I've used, and I can't even remember user comments anything like that.
I'm completely unwilling to give a camera Internet access and allow it to connect to its vendor's website.
It's true they all OFFER a DDNS option, but you can easily turn that off. And recently a large number of the cheapest cameras require a proprietary phone app for setup, but there are still plenty with web interfaces that setup and work just fine with an incorrect gateway address or firewall rules preventing egress. I just bought a $30 one recently.
I'd much prefer a full Linux under my own control than a black box camera OS that wants an Internet connection and can be controlled by the vendor's website.
They're all Linux under the surface, you just need to look around for instructions on gaining access. Often it's just a one-line change in the firmware image before flashing to enable telnet access, or finding the serial port pins on the board, or similar.
I have a few of the Raspberry a+ computers I picked up for 25 bucks apiece and got cameras for at 25 apiece. I stuck them around the outside of my house and installed motion on them giving me a dirt cheap way to monitor the area.
Why in the world would you do that!? You can get WiFi PTZ cameras for as little as $25 on amazon. Pretty good ones are just a bit more, but easily far under your $50 mark.
how does the TV know the content was originally 1080p24? If you do inverse telecine on stuff which was originally recorded live interlaced you won't get very good results.
It's very easy for a filter to try reassembling fields into frames, then checking if they match, and perhaps outputting the interlaced fields to the next filter unmodified if they do not.
The pulldown pattern of duplicate fields is quite uniform and consistent, with the exception of the occasional edit, so it's obvious after just a few frames if your guess was wrong.
A Gallon of gasoline is estimated to have 33.41 KwH! (A normal gas engine throws a good portion of that energy away as heat.) That gallon of gas is pretty close to what my typical household uses in the entire day for electricity! So to pull down the equivalent of a couple of gallons of gas in 20 minutes is going to take the equivalent power drain of a sub-station transformer.
That's some very bald-faced lying.
You already said that the theoretical energy of a tank of gasoline is mostly wasted, but then you go on to use that same number anyhow, as if EVs must waste just as much energy, for some reason. In fact electric motors and Li-Ion batteries are very efficient, while gasoline engines are very inefficient, so the numbers.
In fact a Tesla Model S battery ranges from 60-100 kWh depending on how much you spend, so your gas tank is only 2-3 gallons of theoretical gasoline, while still transporting you 300 miles.
A 60kWh charge in 20 minutes would be no problem for businesses. It's only 375A@480V (3-phase). Here's what 1200 amp, 3-phase electrical service looks like: http://www.pesnj.com/uploads/2... Does that look like a "sub-station transformer" to you?
A typical house doesn't use a 480 volt industrial power feed. You don't want much more current in the hands of consumers.
Why in the world would you need 20 minute charging AT HOME? What kind of emergency would necessitate that? Two people sharing a car, both commuting 100+ miles to work, on different shifts?
Most everyone else plugs-in their car, then GOES TO SLEEP. Who cares whether it charges in 10 minutes, or 10 hours, AT HOME?
Our car batteries get a little cranky w/o either a trickle changer or a battery pad warmer at those temperatures.
Car starter batteries do terribly in cold weather because they are expected to deliver a huge percentage of their power in a few seconds, when cold. An EV will have a huge battery pack, which is only expected to output a small percentage of its available power gradually over the course of your drive.
In short, you'll have less range when the batteries are cold, but they will always work just fine (no start-up problems), and you might even see your range increase while you drive, as the batteries heat-up from being discharged.
And like you said, all cars in cold climates are pluged-in anyhow, so there's really no extra hassle to worry about, and they can be kept in ideal operating temperatures with inexpensive grid power.
Those "parlour tricks" do a pretty good job of driving already, another 4 years of machine learning and I think they'll do a stupendous job.
Autonomous cars did a pretty good job of driving a decade ago, too. I'm sure they'll do a pretty good job a decade from now, as well, but like today, still not be quite good enough.
Google's self-driving cars have reported higher incidents of accidents than human drivers, and most of them are limited to low-speeds, and still need human operators to occasionally get them out of trouble.
Does anyone else have extreme skepticism that we'll see real autonomous vehicles available by 2021?
Not at all. We'll all have self-driving cars by 2021, but we won't need fast-charging Li-ion batteries because they'll be FUSION powered. Oh, and they will also be able to fly...
As I understand it, the main ageing mechanism that kills them is oxidation of the graphite anode, which starts when the cell is manufactured and isn't appreciably affected by usage except for being accelerated somewhat by being stored at high temperatures with low (20%) charge.
That's not to say there isn't calendar fade/degradation of Li-Ion cells. Just that it is far less significant than charge/discharge cycle fade. There is some of both, but that's only a significant concern for long-term standby power applications (not a significant issue for EVs).
Anecdotally, I recently swapped the battery in my cell phone. The replacement unit was new, old-stock. It was 4+ years old, manufactured at the same time as the dying battery it was replacing, but works quite nicely. No doubt it's slightly lower capacity than a newly manufactured battery would be, but not noticeably so.
Verizon has been very reasonable about allowing people to remain on unlimited plans, they could simply make everyone on one sign up for a current plan if they wished. But they don't
Verizon hasn't been reasonable at all... They've had their asses kicked by the Obama FCC every time they tried to impose limits or restrictions. They've tried not to piss off the FCC, and now that Trump is about to gut the agency, Verizon no longer has anything to worry about, for the next 4 years at least.
Slashdot Mirror
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
NOBODY will believe VW when they announce they've got a new, clean diesel. In addition, European countries are announcing future, across-the-board bans on diesels, because the soot they produce is so damaging to health and structures. There's no future in diesel cars, and spending any more money on developing a BETTER dead-end technology is foolish. You might as well tell Kodak to make a slightly cheaper film camera, as digital cameras loom large.
Engines only contribute about 1/3rd of the noise of a vehicle. Air being pushed out from between the wheels and pavement counts for most of the rest. EVs will help a bit, but wont fix the problem.
Completely wrong.
MPEG-2 video and audio come very close to the limits of accurate lossy compression... Specifically, much-higher compression, that does not discard perceptible information (as shown by professional ABX testing) is not possible. This has been matemtatically proven, the term is "Perceptual Entropy" and it sets the upper limits based on physiological models of human senses, established in the late 80s/early 90s most significantly by J.D Johnston of ATT Bell Labs.
That's why nobody is trying to improve upon perfect lossless compression anymore. Instead newer codecs willfully discard perceptible information, but try to generate an output that just looks/sounds "good" but is easily distinguished from the source. That's why only MUSHRA tests are popular today, modern codecs (at common/recomended bitrates) would completely fail professional ABX testing.
America tried an almost completely unregulated free market. It gave us the "robber barons" who monopolized incredible wealth for themselves, and used it to either buy-up or destroy all competitors by cutting them off from their markets. Industrialists who would hire private armies to MURDER union organizers rather than risk increasing labor costs. A state of affairs which eventually caused a little thing called the "great depression" which nearly caused a peasant revolt that would have destroyed this country.
You are but one drop of rain in a monsoon. Ratings *should* appropriately dither over the aggregate, so the few who are in the middle will likely half vote up, while half vote down.
While up/down may not be entirely fair, there's really more options for manipulation in a star rating system. By removing zero-star ratings as an option, they can artificially inflate scores. By changing the textual labels (what if 4-stars was described as "Just Okay"?) they can manipulate people into rating higher. And in general, companies are biased to WANT higher ratings, so you'll be more likely to stay around longer, spending more money, so whatever system they design is going to err or the high side.
You know what ALWAYS comes after a merger? Massive lay-offs. There's no reason to merge two companies if they have just as high costs as when they were operating separately, so eliminating now-redundant jobs is the key reason mergers happen. Approving that is going to make Trump look very, very bad.
The merger was always an idiotic idea... Sprint and T-Mobile have no technology in common, nor do their services complement each other in ANY way... Nearly all the company's towers are deployed in proximity to the other's, so they're redundant and most would just have to go. At best, it would be like the MetroPCS buyout... T-Mobile would be buying the brand, stores, and customers, telling them all they need to replace their phones in short order, and shutting off the foreign network they don't want or need to bother maintaining. It really only serves as a legal way to kill-off a competitor.
Of course Sprint just LOVES idiotic ideas. Nextel, WiMax, Clearwire, Tidal, etc. The more obviously idiot the idea, the quicker Sprint is going to jump at it, so they can start burning money even faster.
They clearly think a merger with T-Mobile is a foregone conclusion, because they've completely given-up on improving their network. They announce upgrades, then cut the budget to not just a fraction of what they need to catch-up, but a fraction of what is needed to just maintain parity and avoid falling further behind their competitors. So Sprint's network keeps getting slower and slower.
Some people have been saying it looks like SoftBank is spinning all their valuable assets off to subsidiaries that they control, but which aren't under Sprint, so as the company fails from the lack of investment, the other investors will get nothing, while SoftBank gets to keep or sell-off everything of value. But I believe it's just more of a delaying strategy... Keep Sprint limping along, but perpetually on the edge of failure, in hopes regulators will fear a (too big to fail) bankruptcy, and go along with a merger no matter how bad it looks for every one of the stakeholders involved.
SoftBank made an idiotic investment. Sprint is worth rescuing, but they aren't interested or particularly capable of doing it. They deserve to lose their shirt. Then sell the company to somebody who's actually going to try to build it back up into a viable and competitive cellular carrier again.
Except he's 100% correct that such an order would exceed the authority of the FCC. Congress could do it, but the FCC cannot. And you should be THANKFUL for that fact, otherwise ATSC/HDTV tuners would all implement the "broadcast flag" and DVRs would be all but illegal. How soon we forget.
Right. And yet Europe is experiencing colony collapse disorder as well. The evidence that neonicotinoids have any contributing effect to CCD is... very weak, at best.
They HAVE TO. There's just too many ridiculous British names...
Let's hear it for the HMS Ridgewell Hancock
Yes indeed, I've been using the basic HTML GMail interface for years now, never liking their slow JS version that blocks every time you click on anything.
I've posted instructions to do so before:
http://pipedot.org/2TPQ
H.264 won because Apple belligerently refuse to even ALLOW WebM add-ons in its products. Having Firefox as a stubborn opponent, rather than pragmatically giving-in every time there's the slightest pressure to do so, is immensely useful, and simply the right thing for the public, even if users are briefly inconvenienced.
This site hasn't called itself "News for Nerds" in quite a few years now. Just look around and try to find that tag-line... It's long gone.
It's been one non-stop decline ever since the "Politics" section was created. First Sourceforge, then Dice, and now BizX have had no interest in the site's origins or credibility, and are only interested in the large audience they can abuse to drive-up ad impressions. Even clicking through to complain about what a shithole this place has become, is PROFIT for them, so they will keep it up. The trolls are profit, the paid shills are profit, the flood of crap on the front-page that has people yelling at their screen is profit for them. And that's the only thing they care about.
Sure the audience has continued declining, sure this place is a joke, sure in the long-term it's an increasingly less valuable property for the change, but they're going to cash-out as much as they can, as soon as they can, and not worry one bit about the smoldering ruin that's left.
People like you are EXACTLY why I refuse to disclose my salary.
Just because you're paying $10k more than my current position, you think I'll jump at the chance, even though it's twice as much work, in a much higher-rent area, etc, etc. So much so, that many companies won't be bothered even spending five minutes explaining the job better than the vague listing.
Or because you're paying $10k less, you think there's no way I'll take the job, and not bother explaining how nice a work environment it is, how many perks there are, opportunities for personal and professional growth, etc.
There's no reason I should have to explain my last salary to you. It has no affect on how valuable I will be to your company. You're a fool to believe it gives you useful information in the first place. If I was less honest, I'd just lie about it, since you can't reliably verify it (and I've never seen anybody even try). That's what many companies are doing, ensuring you only ever hire liars for all positions. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Even worse are the companies who cap annual raises at 3%. That ensures even the best performers only break-even vs inflation, while everyone else is getting annual pay cuts... A great way to send turnover through the roof, and your company into a sinking ship.
I've canceled my cable internet and switched to cellular. I have FIOS in my area, too, but there's more competition in cellular, so us lighter users (not streaming Netflix) can get a better deal. It shouldn't be this way... DSL used to be dirt cheap, and some cable companies even had $15/mo plans, but reduced regulation in the US over many years has eliminated those cheaper options across most of the country. They've held the line better on cellular competition, but I'm concerned that won't last much longer, either.
In any case, Google Fiber isn't an internet monopoly ANYWHERE it operates. Saying it's guaranteed to profit is idiotic... There are always a half dozen competitors around who can undercut Google and steal their fiber customers. Your underpants gnome understanding of economics falls short. When you've got a few million to waste, build your own ISP and get back to us.
Even while people are cord cutting their cable TV, a smaller number are cutting their internet service, too:
http://pipedot.org/story/2015-...
Not at all. You're only ASSUMING that the additional jobs equates to significantly more expense. But you don't have to make that logical leap... we have actual price figures allowing direct comparison, which show that not to be the case.
So we have cheap electricity that generates many more jobs. That might mean less profit for the investors, but a net positive for society.
I've seen several that require IE for in-browser AUDIO, but that's all. Every camera I've purchased can do configuration and video with any browser, and you can do audio with native apps on any platform (just not in-browser), going all the way back to Axis cameras just shy of two decades ago.
In fact, it seems ALL network cameras made today support ONVIF, so there's a compatible standard they all support (though maybe not in your browser of choice). There's nothing unreliable about any of them I've used, and I can't even remember user comments anything like that.
It's true they all OFFER a DDNS option, but you can easily turn that off. And recently a large number of the cheapest cameras require a proprietary phone app for setup, but there are still plenty with web interfaces that setup and work just fine with an incorrect gateway address or firewall rules preventing egress. I just bought a $30 one recently.
They're all Linux under the surface, you just need to look around for instructions on gaining access. Often it's just a one-line change in the firmware image before flashing to enable telnet access, or finding the serial port pins on the board, or similar.
Why in the world would you do that!? You can get WiFi PTZ cameras for as little as $25 on amazon. Pretty good ones are just a bit more, but easily far under your $50 mark.
It's very easy for a filter to try reassembling fields into frames, then checking if they match, and perhaps outputting the interlaced fields to the next filter unmodified if they do not.
The pulldown pattern of duplicate fields is quite uniform and consistent, with the exception of the occasional edit, so it's obvious after just a few frames if your guess was wrong.
That's some very bald-faced lying.
You already said that the theoretical energy of a tank of gasoline is mostly wasted, but then you go on to use that same number anyhow, as if EVs must waste just as much energy, for some reason. In fact electric motors and Li-Ion batteries are very efficient, while gasoline engines are very inefficient, so the numbers.
In fact a Tesla Model S battery ranges from 60-100 kWh depending on how much you spend, so your gas tank is only 2-3 gallons of theoretical gasoline, while still transporting you 300 miles.
A 60kWh charge in 20 minutes would be no problem for businesses. It's only 375A@480V (3-phase). Here's what 1200 amp, 3-phase electrical service looks like:
http://www.pesnj.com/uploads/2...
Does that look like a "sub-station transformer" to you?
Why in the world would you need 20 minute charging AT HOME? What kind of emergency would necessitate that? Two people sharing a car, both commuting 100+ miles to work, on different shifts?
Most everyone else plugs-in their car, then GOES TO SLEEP. Who cares whether it charges in 10 minutes, or 10 hours, AT HOME?
Car starter batteries do terribly in cold weather because they are expected to deliver a huge percentage of their power in a few seconds, when cold. An EV will have a huge battery pack, which is only expected to output a small percentage of its available power gradually over the course of your drive.
In short, you'll have less range when the batteries are cold, but they will always work just fine (no start-up problems), and you might even see your range increase while you drive, as the batteries heat-up from being discharged.
And like you said, all cars in cold climates are pluged-in anyhow, so there's really no extra hassle to worry about, and they can be kept in ideal operating temperatures with inexpensive grid power.
Autonomous cars did a pretty good job of driving a decade ago, too. I'm sure they'll do a pretty good job a decade from now, as well, but like today, still not be quite good enough.
Google's self-driving cars have reported higher incidents of accidents than human drivers, and most of them are limited to low-speeds, and still need human operators to occasionally get them out of trouble.
Not at all. We'll all have self-driving cars by 2021, but we won't need fast-charging Li-ion batteries because they'll be FUSION powered. Oh, and they will also be able to fly...
That's complete nonsense.
Li-Ion cells absolutely are severely negatively affected by cycling. (PDF)
That's not to say there isn't calendar fade/degradation of Li-Ion cells. Just that it is far less significant than charge/discharge cycle fade. There is some of both, but that's only a significant concern for long-term standby power applications (not a significant issue for EVs).
Anecdotally, I recently swapped the battery in my cell phone. The replacement unit was new, old-stock. It was 4+ years old, manufactured at the same time as the dying battery it was replacing, but works quite nicely. No doubt it's slightly lower capacity than a newly manufactured battery would be, but not noticeably so.
Verizon hasn't been reasonable at all... They've had their asses kicked by the Obama FCC every time they tried to impose limits or restrictions. They've tried not to piss off the FCC, and now that Trump is about to gut the agency, Verizon no longer has anything to worry about, for the next 4 years at least.