If they do, why isn't the power company buying up Tesla's production for the foreseeable future?
How much money do you think Tesla would demand in return for shutting down its electric car business, given that it is an electric car company? I'm guessing it would be enough that a power company interested in battery storage would be better off finding their battery supply elsewhere.
Yes, RoboCop notwithstanding, remote-controlled robot go-betweens could cut down considerably on the amount of gun deaths and injuries caused by police.
Why are the police in the USA always so hair-trigger ready to tase/tackle/shoot someone? Because they are worried (sometimes with justification) about being shot or injured themselves. Whenever they see something that triggers their threat alarm, they have a few hundred milliseconds to decide whether the threat is real, and if so, how to defend themselves -- and if they get it wrong, they could end up dead, or alternatively end up killing an innocent person. Humans being what they are, it's no real surprise that both types of mistake get made, with the latter happening more than the former.
But what if, hypothetically, the policeman was immune to all damage? Then he wouldn't even need to carry a gun; he could just calmly walk towards someone who was emptying a clip into him, and when all the bullets had been shot, handcuff the guy and take him to jail.
Of course that's not practical, but the next-best thing is, or will be at some point in the not-too-distant future: instead of the policeman sending himself into harm's way, he'll send his unarmed bot over to investigate. Via the bot, he'll be able to talk remotely to the people in the (car/building/whatever) and determine whether or not they are a threat. If they are co-operative he can tell them what he needs them to do to resolve (or at least, secure) the situation; if not, he can call for backup. In no case does he have any fear for his own safety, and thus he has no (rational) reason to shoot anyone.
In the worst-case scenario, someone shoots the robot, in which case the police department has to repair it or buy a new one, but by that time the shooter's name, face, and license plate have already been captured and uploaded, so it's just a matter of time until the shooter is caught anyway.
We already use this sort of technology for bomb-refusal and hostage situations, it's just a matter of time before it becomes practical for everyday interactions. Robots aren't quite fast or dextrous enough yet, but in a few years they will be.
Side note: the guy that installed our new furnace a couple years ago said he runs solar in his home with no battery pack, at night he just switches over to the utility power (actually I think it switches automatically).
Assuming that guy is doing the standard grid-tie configuration, it's not that the house "switches over" at night, so much as that all power generated by the solar array goes out to the local grid (and causes the electric meter to run backwards), and all power used by the house comes from the grid (causing the electric meter to run forward). The actual electric bill is therefore calculated by subtracting the amount generated from the amount used during each billing cycle.
For example, if you raise the taxes on xyz corporation, they will simply raise the prices of their products/services to keep their bottom line the same.
Sounds like you're assuming 100% inelastic demand. For life-saving pharmaceuticals and similar absolute necessities, you may be right (hence the steady rise in health care prices, perhaps), but for most things, companies are not free to simply raise prices whenever they want to, because if they did, fewer people would buy their product/service, and they would make less profit than they would if they kept prices down.
If staying in business was simply a matter of totaling up all costs (including taxes) and then setting prices to some level higher than that, no company would ever go out of business. In real life, the only companies lucky enough to operate that way are government contractors operating on cost-plus contracts.
No, he's pointing out that people who want to kill other people for notoriety are going to do it, laws or not.
Like any other crime, there are a few people who will commit the crime regardless of any law, and there are of course many people who would never commit the crime, even if they were 100% guaranteed to get away with it. The law's deterrent effect is seen only in the third group of people: those who would commit the crime if they thought they could get away with it, but won't actually do it because of the risk of being caught and punished.
It sounds like you are arguing that the third group does not exist. If so, I think you are wrong about that.
Why ask questions you already know the answer to? The Model 3 is scheduled to begin sales in 2018, which (if I my Tesla-to-Earth-time calculations are correct) means it ought to be available to the public by 2020 or so.
All that happened is that the NSA listened in on terrorists, as well as other nations
If that was "all that happened", there wouldn't be much controversy. But in addition that, the NSA was also extralegally collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans, despite repeated assurances to the public that they were not doing that.
Jesse Ventura put it rather well when he said something on the lines of "Give me Dick Cheney strapped to a folding table and a pitcher of water, and in 5 minutes I'll get him to confess to the Manson Family murders."
I think Mr. Ventura would be better served by waterboarding Cheney until Cheney agrees that waterboarding is torture.
Once that's been accomplished, there are only two interpretations: either Cheney has finally admitted the truth, in which case we have established that waterboarding is torture and therefore illegal; or Cheney was lying in order to make the waterboarding stop, in which case we have established that waterboarding is ineffective as means of extracting truthful information.
... and he's currently bringing in a whopping 2.4% of Republicans in the polls.
A cynical person might interpret this as suggesting that the conservative voters are motivated much less by "freedom" than by the sweet, sweet indulgence of their fear and hatred of (whichever non-majority social groups have been selected as their official scapegoats for the season).
CURRENTLY free. As a carrot to get people to various locations. When it becomes popular, it'll cease to be free, as it'll be a measurable cost to provide.
Tesla has promised that Superchargers would remain free to Tesla owners indefinitely, so if they renege on that promise to existing owners, there would likely be lawsuits.
Of course they could make charging non-free to people who buy new Teslas in the future, but given Tesla's high-end image, and the relatively low cost of providing the service, they'll probably just keep doing what they do now -- figuring out how much the average Tesla's lifetime use of the Supercharger network is likely to cost them, and bumping up each car's sale price by that amount.
I can go 500+ miles in my car, and then do it again 2 minutes later.
You can go for a ride inside your clothes dryer too, but why would you want to do something so unpleasant? Outside of a dire emergency, I can't imagine anyone wanting to do make two 6-hour trips with only a 2-minute break in between.
Here's something to try: find out how much time the average ICE car owner spends driving to gas stations, waiting in line, waiting for his car to refuel, paying for the gas, driving back, etc. Then find out how much time the average electric car owner actually spends waiting for his car to recharge. The results may surprise you.
In a sane world, Google or IBM or someone clever will come up with a program where you type in a rough English description of the injury and it returns the set of codes that are likely to match that description, and then guides you interactively towards choosing the correct code from that set.
I'm going to be naively optimistic and assume that this has already been done, at least to some extent.:)
I don't think the coding is that useful in itself, but the flexible problem solving that comes from the inevitable bugs in their code and thinking about how to test if it's giving good output is pretty valuable.
^^^ What he said. Programming may or may not be useful for most people, but the ability to troubleshoot a problem systematically and methodically is a skill that can be applied to all kinds of situations.
"shh" don't tell the investors but Tesla still has not made a profit in four years. Last year they built 35,00 cars and lost US$294.0 million. That is $8,400 per car.
Let's give the investors a little credit, shall we, and assume that they know the difference between losing money and investing money? Because Tesla's the money you think Tesla is "losing" is actually being pumped into scaling up their operations (Gigafactory, additional assembly lines, Supercharger network, etc). Hence the high stock valuation -- lots of people (many of whom are smarter than you or I) are betting that they have a bright future.
For one thing, according to the article, the acid-based (toxic) version of the battery stores about 1/3rd more energy per unit volume, so the non-toxic materials are a trade-off of capacity for safety.
For another thing, innovation doesn't work the way you seem to think it does. You don't usually start by inventing the final, most optimized version, because it's often not obvious what will work and what won't until you've done some experiments to see what is possible. Once you've got a prototype that works, then it is time to start thinking about how you could make it better for version 2.
Why should a paper airplane bother anyone? They might as well have come up with plans to build a Death Star in orbit.
If/when someone decides to actually start building this airplane (and asking for the billions of euros required to do so), then it becomes something worth being bothered by.
Until then, gas's "recharge" time (less than 5 minutes) + 10,000s of locations to fill up trumps all-electric every day of the week as of today.
You'd think that, but in practice most electric car owners spend less time refueling than gas car owners do.
Why? Because it takes them just 10 seconds to plug in the car in their garage after they drive in, and 5 more seconds to unplug it again in the morning before they drive out -- a total of ~1.5 person-minutes spent recharging per week. Compare that to the 5-10 person-minutes per week that gas car owners spend driving to the gas station, waiting for a pump, refueling, paying, and then driving back again, and it's the gas car that is usually more time-consuming to refuel.
Of course the electric recharges are less convenient during long trips (Superchargers notwithstanding), since the driver has to wait for the recharge to finish, but long trips aren't the common case for most cars -- daily commuting and errand-running is.
Don't they produce more torque than you can get friction with tires?
Sure, although a number of gas-powered cars can do that also AFAIK.
So the limiting nature might be on the tire design.
No worries, someone will design a car with 8 wheels; the usual four plus an extra four that descend to touch the ground only during hard acceleration or braking, thus doubling the amount of friction available.
Slashdot Mirror
Do the numbers really work for this?
I have no idea.
If they do, why isn't the power company buying up Tesla's production for the foreseeable future?
How much money do you think Tesla would demand in return for shutting down its electric car business, given that it is an electric car company? I'm guessing it would be enough that a power company interested in battery storage would be better off finding their battery supply elsewhere.
I don't know, why? You could buy a $1000 car and park it on the street.
$1000 cars are also known for not always doing what you want them to do.
Yes, RoboCop notwithstanding, remote-controlled robot go-betweens could cut down considerably on the amount of gun deaths and injuries caused by police.
Why are the police in the USA always so hair-trigger ready to tase/tackle/shoot someone? Because they are worried (sometimes with justification) about being shot or injured themselves. Whenever they see something that triggers their threat alarm, they have a few hundred milliseconds to decide whether the threat is real, and if so, how to defend themselves -- and if they get it wrong, they could end up dead, or alternatively end up killing an innocent person. Humans being what they are, it's no real surprise that both types of mistake get made, with the latter happening more than the former.
But what if, hypothetically, the policeman was immune to all damage? Then he wouldn't even need to carry a gun; he could just calmly walk towards someone who was emptying a clip into him, and when all the bullets had been shot, handcuff the guy and take him to jail.
Of course that's not practical, but the next-best thing is, or will be at some point in the not-too-distant future: instead of the policeman sending himself into harm's way, he'll send his unarmed bot over to investigate. Via the bot, he'll be able to talk remotely to the people in the (car/building/whatever) and determine whether or not they are a threat. If they are co-operative he can tell them what he needs them to do to resolve (or at least, secure) the situation; if not, he can call for backup. In no case does he have any fear for his own safety, and thus he has no (rational) reason to shoot anyone.
In the worst-case scenario, someone shoots the robot, in which case the police department has to repair it or buy a new one, but by that time the shooter's name, face, and license plate have already been captured and uploaded, so it's just a matter of time until the shooter is caught anyway.
We already use this sort of technology for bomb-refusal and hostage situations, it's just a matter of time before it becomes practical for everyday interactions. Robots aren't quite fast or dextrous enough yet, but in a few years they will be.
Side note: the guy that installed our new furnace a couple years ago said he runs solar in his home with no battery pack, at night he just switches over to the utility power (actually I think it switches automatically).
Assuming that guy is doing the standard grid-tie configuration, it's not that the house "switches over" at night, so much as that all power generated by the solar array goes out to the local grid (and causes the electric meter to run backwards), and all power used by the house comes from the grid (causing the electric meter to run forward). The actual electric bill is therefore calculated by subtracting the amount generated from the amount used during each billing cycle.
For example, if you raise the taxes on xyz corporation, they will simply raise the prices of their products/services to keep their bottom line the same.
Sounds like you're assuming 100% inelastic demand. For life-saving pharmaceuticals and similar absolute necessities, you may be right (hence the steady rise in health care prices, perhaps), but for most things, companies are not free to simply raise prices whenever they want to, because if they did, fewer people would buy their product/service, and they would make less profit than they would if they kept prices down.
If staying in business was simply a matter of totaling up all costs (including taxes) and then setting prices to some level higher than that, no company would ever go out of business. In real life, the only companies lucky enough to operate that way are government contractors operating on cost-plus contracts.
No, he's pointing out that people who want to kill other people for notoriety are going to do it, laws or not.
Like any other crime, there are a few people who will commit the crime regardless of any law, and there are of course many people who would never commit the crime, even if they were 100% guaranteed to get away with it. The law's deterrent effect is seen only in the third group of people: those who would commit the crime if they thought they could get away with it, but won't actually do it because of the risk of being caught and punished.
It sounds like you are arguing that the third group does not exist. If so, I think you are wrong about that.
You can't think of any other possibilities?
Can you? If so, why not post them?
Why ask questions you already know the answer to? The Model 3 is scheduled to begin sales in 2018, which (if I my Tesla-to-Earth-time calculations are correct) means it ought to be available to the public by 2020 or so.
Pretty much the only time spent is actually at the pumps.
Okay, let's say a smart ICE owner spends 5 minutes a week refueling his gasoline car.
The next part is, how much time does an electric car owner spend per week waiting for his car to recharge? More than 5 minutes per week, or less?
All that happened is that the NSA listened in on terrorists, as well as other nations
If that was "all that happened", there wouldn't be much controversy. But in addition that, the NSA was also extralegally collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans, despite repeated assurances to the public that they were not doing that.
Jesse Ventura put it rather well when he said something on the lines of "Give me Dick Cheney strapped to a folding table and a pitcher of water, and in 5 minutes I'll get him to confess to the Manson Family murders."
I think Mr. Ventura would be better served by waterboarding Cheney until Cheney agrees that waterboarding is torture.
Once that's been accomplished, there are only two interpretations: either Cheney has finally admitted the truth, in which case we have established that waterboarding is torture and therefore illegal; or Cheney was lying in order to make the waterboarding stop, in which case we have established that waterboarding is ineffective as means of extracting truthful information.
... and he's currently bringing in a whopping 2.4% of Republicans in the polls.
A cynical person might interpret this as suggesting that the conservative voters are motivated much less by "freedom" than by the sweet, sweet indulgence of their fear and hatred of (whichever non-majority social groups have been selected as their official scapegoats for the season).
The irony is that anarchy is a system that only works as long as all parties are willing to play by the (unwritten) rules :)
CURRENTLY free. As a carrot to get people to various locations. When it becomes popular, it'll cease to be free, as it'll be a measurable cost to provide.
Tesla has promised that Superchargers would remain free to Tesla owners indefinitely, so if they renege on that promise to existing owners, there would likely be lawsuits.
Of course they could make charging non-free to people who buy new Teslas in the future, but given Tesla's high-end image, and the relatively low cost of providing the service, they'll probably just keep doing what they do now -- figuring out how much the average Tesla's lifetime use of the Supercharger network is likely to cost them, and bumping up each car's sale price by that amount.
I can go 500+ miles in my car, and then do it again 2 minutes later.
You can go for a ride inside your clothes dryer too, but why would you want to do something so unpleasant? Outside of a dire emergency, I can't imagine anyone wanting to do make two 6-hour trips with only a 2-minute break in between.
Here's something to try: find out how much time the average ICE car owner spends driving to gas stations, waiting in line, waiting for his car to refuel, paying for the gas, driving back, etc. Then find out how much time the average electric car owner actually spends waiting for his car to recharge. The results may surprise you.
It is the Democrat administration that is pushing this. Congressional Republicans are trying to stop it.
The beauty of the above two sentences is that you can reuse them for just about any political news story, ever.
In a sane world, Google or IBM or someone clever will come up with a program where you type in a rough English description of the injury and it returns the set of codes that are likely to match that description, and then guides you interactively towards choosing the correct code from that set.
I'm going to be naively optimistic and assume that this has already been done, at least to some extent. :)
I don't think the coding is that useful in itself, but the flexible problem solving that comes from the inevitable bugs in their code and thinking about how to test if it's giving good output is pretty valuable.
^^^ What he said. Programming may or may not be useful for most people, but the ability to troubleshoot a problem systematically and methodically is a skill that can be applied to all kinds of situations.
Presumably all those nouveau-riche AIs will have cash to spend... :)
"shh" don't tell the investors but Tesla still has not made a profit in four years. Last year they built 35,00 cars and lost US$294.0 million. That is $8,400 per car.
Let's give the investors a little credit, shall we, and assume that they know the difference between losing money and investing money? Because Tesla's the money you think Tesla is "losing" is actually being pumped into scaling up their operations (Gigafactory, additional assembly lines, Supercharger network, etc). Hence the high stock valuation -- lots of people (many of whom are smarter than you or I) are betting that they have a bright future.
For one thing, according to the article, the acid-based (toxic) version of the battery stores about 1/3rd more energy per unit volume, so the non-toxic materials are a trade-off of capacity for safety.
For another thing, innovation doesn't work the way you seem to think it does. You don't usually start by inventing the final, most optimized version, because it's often not obvious what will work and what won't until you've done some experiments to see what is possible. Once you've got a prototype that works, then it is time to start thinking about how you could make it better for version 2.
Yes the TPS reports will be in on time with the new cover sheet... I just added it to the script that makes them for me.
Right, but if they can get a robot to know when and how to modify the script, they can downsize you also, and improve company profits that much more.
Why should a paper airplane bother anyone? They might as well have come up with plans to build a Death Star in orbit.
If/when someone decides to actually start building this airplane (and asking for the billions of euros required to do so), then it becomes something worth being bothered by.
Until then, gas's "recharge" time (less than 5 minutes) + 10,000s of locations to fill up trumps all-electric every day of the week as of today.
You'd think that, but in practice most electric car owners spend less time refueling than gas car owners do.
Why? Because it takes them just 10 seconds to plug in the car in their garage after they drive in, and 5 more seconds to unplug it again in the morning before they drive out -- a total of ~1.5 person-minutes spent recharging per week. Compare that to the 5-10 person-minutes per week that gas car owners spend driving to the gas station, waiting for a pump, refueling, paying, and then driving back again, and it's the gas car that is usually more time-consuming to refuel.
Of course the electric recharges are less convenient during long trips (Superchargers notwithstanding), since the driver has to wait for the recharge to finish, but long trips aren't the common case for most cars -- daily commuting and errand-running is.
Don't they produce more torque than you can get friction with tires?
Sure, although a number of gas-powered cars can do that also AFAIK.
So the limiting nature might be on the tire design.
No worries, someone will design a car with 8 wheels; the usual four plus an extra four that descend to touch the ground only during hard acceleration or braking, thus doubling the amount of friction available.
Eh, could happen.... :)