Well Elon has said that legally speaking the car can't self drive. Technically speaking it can and he's said that if you fall asleep at the wheel you shouldn't get into an accident and most likely will just keep driving until you wake up (not sure if navigation is enabled if it can then take exits). But due to legalese one part of the autopilot is limited to private property (though it'll be interesting to know how the car determines if it's on private property or not). Namely you can exit the car and it'll self-park (including opening the garage door and closing it) and at a shopping center or what not you can call the car over to you from its parking spot. It'll drive without a driver to you. Also, if you integrate your calendar with the car and it knows you have a meeting at 9 and it takes 30 minutes to drive there the car will heat itself, back out of your garage and come to the door by 8:15 ready and waiting with your favorites ready to go. THAT is more of an autopilot than is currently rolling on the streets. That's entirely bringing to mind the nice old KITT car;)
Well the one time I did get it I was lounging and was braking with just my toe (you hardly ever use the brake pedal anyway thanks to aggressive regen). After that I've induced myself a few times to demonstrate to people the hazard warning etc. To think back clearly now I'm not sure I've actually triggered it unintentionally beyond that one time when I was toeing it, the other few times probably are demonstrations to passengers.
And I hardly see it as a problem, definitely not a design flaw as there is no way to accelerate and brake together. As the accelerator is electronic (and non-linear as it takes into account both the pedal position as well as the speed of change when accelerating the car, one of the best features of the car so far for me) it will just be ignored if there is signal that the brake pedal is in use as well. The only thing you get is the audible warning, never any unintended acceleration.
The brake pedal is elevated with regard to the gas pedal meaning that in essentially any situation you hit the break first. If you double pedal the car will break and not only that, it WILL tell you that you are pressing both pedals and make an audible noise.
So I'd have to conclude that the problem lies between the pedals and the seat in this case.
And I know cause I drive one daily and I have managed to double pedal a total of two-three times when being lazy and it's never been a situation where it'd lead to the car not stopping. Also, with regard to hill hold the firmware 5.9 comes with hill hold where after breaking the car remains holding the current position no matter what angle 1s after you release the brake to allow for easy hill hold. At least that's what the first owners of 5.9 report.
That's precisely what Tesla is planning to do. Slice the price at least to half in the Gen-III car (Model E) and then further in the Gen-IV car. Gen-III is 3-4 years out, Gen-IV probably 3-4 after that. Price goal for Model E is ~30-35k$ and with savings from gasoline and service should be equivalent to 20-25k$ cars in total cost of ownership.
So if it's completely off how do you make contact with it to turn the AC on before driving and slide the charging level up a bit so that it charges a bit warming the battery in winter. You know to connect the car has to maintain a regular standby connection to 3G or WiFi able to be pinged. I personally switched off the sleep mode because I don't drive that much and waiting for the car to wake up for 2 minutes was annoying. If I go on road trips I'll probably turn sleep mode on again. But so far I saw about 8km drain overnight with sleep mode off, but the car is instantly active on iPhone app as well as when sitting in.
So spending 40W to watch for the keyfob approach, poll the 3G service and do some other minor internals isn't that much. And losing about 12c worth of electricity per day or so won't break my wallet either.
Hmm... isn't this already being employed by SpaceX? Just look at the 3D design video and at the 3 minute mark Elon describes how they send the design straight to laser-metal printer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNqs_S-zEBY
Take that $30k, add to it the average 5 years of 13k miles (75k miles total) at 30mpg and $4-5 / gallon and you get to ~$40-45k usd. And voila you're in the same ballpark as the Gen III Tesla.
You're making a LOT of big assumptions there, depending GREATLY on where you live:
So are you apparently.
Free electricity to fuel the Tesla
Not unless you live in a city where Tesla is providing free chargers. I don't, and I'm pretty sure my power company won't just give it to me for free if I tell them I'm a Tesla owner.
Well 20 eur a month is close enough to free compared to 220 eur a month that I pay right now.
$5/gallon for gasoline
More like $3.50 here.
More like $7 here (1.4 eur / liter).
Cost of maintenance for both cars is similar
Wow, that is a BIG assumption right there. Pretty sure a Tesla dealership is going to charge considerably more for maintenance than a local garage. And very few local garages around here can work on Teslas.
I think by maintenance he meant the (semi-)annual maintenance that all cars go through. Tesla actually publishes the cost on their website. If you pay in advance for four years I think it was 2000 eur total. So 500 eur / year. I can guarantee the breaks, oils, filters and what not that are done on any modern car usually cost above that in maintenance. Repairs are a different topic altogether and should mostly be covered by insurance or warranty.
Also, Elon Musk has stated that the service centers MUST NOT EVER earn profit. They must repair and maintain the Model S at the lowest possible cost while giving the customer the best experience. Tesla gets its profit from sales to end users and other manufacturers, it does not plan to earn profit from service work. This is a major disruption to the usual business model where dealerships earn little in the car sales (hence the low margin business) and earn shitloads in service work. As an example, the local Mitsubishi dealership is 2-3x more expensive than the rally team that I know who rebuilds their Evo X daily. They order the parts from the same central warehouses in EU, doubt that the labor is cheaper, but the repairs are far far cheaper in total when done at the rally shop. So yes, the maintenance is actually going to be cheaper for Model S than for any brand new car that you service at the dealership, not your uncle Joe's garage (here for example that's a requirement for warranty as well as leasing).
The Tesla battery lasts for 10 years + 150,000 miles
You ever had a cellphone battery last for 10 years without degrading?
Sorry, but color me skeptical.
From what I have understood the comparison isn't viable. Industrial grade batteries supposedly have less degradation and the battery LiIon battery lasts best when on average between 30-80% full and has daily usage. Tesla battery warranty for 85kW model (the one I'm planning) is 8 years unlimited miles. The various statements I've heard are that the battery is designed in normal use to have above 70% remaining capacity after 7 years. That is a pretty neat. You'll probably have shitload of car issues in those 7 years with your ICE and drivetrain. I've for example already had to swap the clutch assembly on my Evo X and the estimate is that this is once every 3 years or so. The cost of that is in thousands + labor cost (it's a full day of dismantling and rebuilding). The Model S doesn't even have a clutch.
So if you want to buy an el cheapo ICE, go ahead. If you want to buy a decent luxury performance car, then there is no better car in the world right now than the Model S. From performance and handling stats it's gonna smoke most all the luxury cars and a huge amount of the performance/sports cars. It'll give tough competition to even some supercars. From luxury point of view it has far more space than most cars and it's cheap to own and maintain. Also, as you can use regen breaking most of the time it's one pedal driving and you won't wear through the breaks as fast as with ICE cars, again reducing costs even if not as much as some other elements.
I just did a total cost of ownership calculation for a Model S and it's cheapish. Here in Estonia the highest cost will come from insurance because Tesla doesn't have a service center in the country, once that's alleviated in some way and the insurance comes down from the currently ridiculous 6500-8500 eur / year to a more reasonable 1000-1500 eur / year (mostly driven by car price) the Model S will be cheaper than most cars in its own class. The competing car I chose is the Audi A5 / S5 or similar. The cost of owning the car including financing, "fuel", service and insurance is the same as Model S 85kW model EVEN with the absurd insurance cost. If the insurance drops to compatible levels (and it is in countries where Tesla has a service center) then the Model S is far cheaper to own for TCO per annum.
Now if you compare it to crap like an Accord, then of course you can claim that those are cheaper, but that's not the target segment. To be fair the Model S 60 kW version is comparable in TCO to a car ca 20-30k eur cheaper due to low to no fuel costs compared to what we pay for gasoline here in EU. And I only calculated in my average usage of 12 000 km / year. If you drive more the discrepancy will only enhance. I'm currently driving a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X, a rally car. The total cost of ownership in the last 12 months was higher than the Model S mostly because of the fact that after 5 years of use the Evo X repairs are picking up (a simple 4-wheel drive pump cost 3000 eur, suspension replacement cost another few k etc). Even without the repairs it's only the insurance that makes a difference and the Evo X is worth only 24k eur while the Model S in EU costs far more than in US (80k for 60kW, 90k eur for 85kW with VAT). The good part is that in Estonia we have government incentives of size 18k eur that you get for an electric and we have charging stations within maximum 40km anywhere you are.
So all-in-all my next car is a Tesla, only thing that I need to do now is get some further replies from them and finalize the financing etc (and I really need to lobby the insurance to reduce their cost).
It's not actually hard to cite. Just google Model S review and you'll get plenty and the reasons are fairly obvious. The Model S has been designed for aerodynamics to reduce the air drag mostly for lower energy cost and therefore increased milage, but that also improves handling at higher speeds. For lower and higher speeds the main thing however is the extremely low center of gravity. During the safety tests they had to cheat because none of their standard methods was able to make the Model S roll over due to the extremely low center of gravity. It's competing in the supercar category with it and it's 100% due to choice of location for battery pack that is the heaviest component in the car. Low center of gravity as well as center-car center of mass (there's no huge mass offsetting the mass center like in ICE cars and the battery pack is uniform in the floor) give excellent turning capabilities. Also, the stock 19" or higher wheels come with good tires that add to the handling, but that's something most manufacturers could do. The excellent mass placement however is almost impossible to achieve in an ICE due to the engine throwing off the balance (hence most supercars are center-engine type for handling and mass distribution).
Yes it is. mr X does exchange and reveals his wallet address. Therefore you can track said wallets balance and transactions. However said person X or maybe in fact any number of persons could easily obfuscate everything by creating 10K addresses and randomly moving the money around between them. If they collect on 100 addresses and use 10K to obfuscate it's about as close to anonymous you can get.
I'll bite, what part of SpaceX doesn't fit for you? The NASA contract helped things along faster, but Elon's been claiming it only changed the dates when their goals were reached. They were doing well even without and would've gotten to where they are, just later...
You forget the matter / wave duality. An electron orbiting a nucleus is a standing wave. There is no moving electron, just a quantum system with an oscillation energy defined by QM. You cannot claim accelerating motion hence no bremsshtralung hence no crash.
Being a Mac user I'd happily trade one of the USB ports of my 2010 MBP for a Thunderbolt port for external display daisy chaining. The laptop's still good enough that I've not had the heart to upgrade to a newer one, but Thunderbolt and retina display are the two big items in my next laptop wishlist.
From what I've understood from Tim's interviews on this topic (and he's asked that frequently) is not the point of taxes or more expensive workforce. It's the lack of expertise. You guys don't seem to have enough experts to do the R&D and product and material development because of reducing standards in education in comparison to China. Sure they could do the final assembly by drones in US, but why do all the production of high end components in asia, then send the items to US for assembly and then distribute globally. And they do have some parts made in US already (wasn't the gorilla glass part a US development or smth similar).
So according to Tim there aren't enough experts in material science etc to build the factories and keep developing them in comparison. That's the bottom line. Not the assembly line drones. There are plenty of those globally, currently employed by fast food restaurants.
Why do you claim that they should have lost the vehicle? A failure of one engine out of 9 is something that the system was designed to handle. And the fact that it was designed to handle this doesn't mean that it's considered normal operation. Your car has an airbag designed to handle an accident, this doesn't mean that accidents will be normal operation.
In fact as mentioned multiple times already the Falcon 9 switches off two rockets at a late phase of the launch to avoid exceeding 5g acceleration, therefore the loss of one subengine wouldn't cause a loss of vehicle.
Yes, they will investigate it thoroughly and understand what was the cause and wether it needs fixing (1C will only make one more flight afaik) or if this has already been addressed in Merlin 1-D or Merlin 2, but in no way should you claim that the vehicles success was a crazy luck accident.
No, but those were really and truly crap for browsing. I was an early adopter and all the treos etc in the world couldn't compete or truly be well usable. Their screens were of crappy quality, low res and only half of the device due to keyboards. If you want to call that browsing, then good luck...
Not sure. Terminal velocity is determined by air resistance. The surface area of a Cray2 is larger therefore it'd probably fall slower assuming the iPad managed to keep the sharp surface pointed towards the ground. Of course if the iPad went nicely flat it may well have a relative resistive surface that's larger so block better. Hmm... This isn't that trivial to solve I think. We need an experiment.
In estonia the iPhone package is 44 eur giving you the 4S for free (16GB), 100 min, 60 sms, 500MB data for 24 months.
If you take the same conditions without the phone it's ca 15 eur/month so the 30 eur/month is the phone fee. So buying it out vs contract does give a difference here...
Got an iPhone 4 and planning to upgrade. For me the 4S wasn't a large enough upgrade to go with it, but I do feel the lack of siri as a point. Now with iPhone 5 i also get added benefits in slightly larger screen (thank god it's not as huge as SIII has), the performance snappiness, the camera upgrade and a number of iOS upgrades that do not come to iPhone 4. And at least in Estonia the LTE speed is quite decent so that's added value as well. Also, I can sell the iPhone 4 for about half of the iPhone 5 cost making it a reasonable upgrade without a contractual need.
The heck are you speaking? I'm maintaining a huge datacenter and partook in the Higgs discovery using a MacBook Pro. What is it in a full Linux distro that is so needed that you need a Linux/Windows VM? I write python and C code for both simulationdata mining and visualization and it works fluently in OS X.
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Well Elon has said that legally speaking the car can't self drive. Technically speaking it can and he's said that if you fall asleep at the wheel you shouldn't get into an accident and most likely will just keep driving until you wake up (not sure if navigation is enabled if it can then take exits). But due to legalese one part of the autopilot is limited to private property (though it'll be interesting to know how the car determines if it's on private property or not). Namely you can exit the car and it'll self-park (including opening the garage door and closing it) and at a shopping center or what not you can call the car over to you from its parking spot. It'll drive without a driver to you. Also, if you integrate your calendar with the car and it knows you have a meeting at 9 and it takes 30 minutes to drive there the car will heat itself, back out of your garage and come to the door by 8:15 ready and waiting with your favorites ready to go. THAT is more of an autopilot than is currently rolling on the streets. That's entirely bringing to mind the nice old KITT car ;)
Yeah yeah, posted at a bad time and mixed up my break, brake. Non-native speaker here, so sue me ;)
Well the one time I did get it I was lounging and was braking with just my toe (you hardly ever use the brake pedal anyway thanks to aggressive regen). After that I've induced myself a few times to demonstrate to people the hazard warning etc. To think back clearly now I'm not sure I've actually triggered it unintentionally beyond that one time when I was toeing it, the other few times probably are demonstrations to passengers.
And I hardly see it as a problem, definitely not a design flaw as there is no way to accelerate and brake together. As the accelerator is electronic (and non-linear as it takes into account both the pedal position as well as the speed of change when accelerating the car, one of the best features of the car so far for me) it will just be ignored if there is signal that the brake pedal is in use as well. The only thing you get is the audible warning, never any unintended acceleration.
In the Tesla it's all digital. The moment the car detects both pedals pressed it will just ignore the accelerator ;)
The brake pedal is elevated with regard to the gas pedal meaning that in essentially any situation you hit the break first. If you double pedal the car will break and not only that, it WILL tell you that you are pressing both pedals and make an audible noise.
So I'd have to conclude that the problem lies between the pedals and the seat in this case.
And I know cause I drive one daily and I have managed to double pedal a total of two-three times when being lazy and it's never been a situation where it'd lead to the car not stopping. Also, with regard to hill hold the firmware 5.9 comes with hill hold where after breaking the car remains holding the current position no matter what angle 1s after you release the brake to allow for easy hill hold. At least that's what the first owners of 5.9 report.
That's precisely what Tesla is planning to do. Slice the price at least to half in the Gen-III car (Model E) and then further in the Gen-IV car. Gen-III is 3-4 years out, Gen-IV probably 3-4 after that. Price goal for Model E is ~30-35k$ and with savings from gasoline and service should be equivalent to 20-25k$ cars in total cost of ownership.
So if it's completely off how do you make contact with it to turn the AC on before driving and slide the charging level up a bit so that it charges a bit warming the battery in winter. You know to connect the car has to maintain a regular standby connection to 3G or WiFi able to be pinged. I personally switched off the sleep mode because I don't drive that much and waiting for the car to wake up for 2 minutes was annoying. If I go on road trips I'll probably turn sleep mode on again. But so far I saw about 8km drain overnight with sleep mode off, but the car is instantly active on iPhone app as well as when sitting in.
So spending 40W to watch for the keyfob approach, poll the 3G service and do some other minor internals isn't that much. And losing about 12c worth of electricity per day or so won't break my wallet either.
Hmm... isn't this already being employed by SpaceX? Just look at the 3D design video and at the 3 minute mark Elon describes how they send the design straight to laser-metal printer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNqs_S-zEBY
So ... what else is new?
Take that $30k, add to it the average 5 years of 13k miles (75k miles total) at 30mpg and $4-5 / gallon and you get to ~$40-45k usd. And voila you're in the same ballpark as the Gen III Tesla.
So you are claiming that he could drive a tesla for the same total price as an Accord if he drives for 10 years :) Guess you really are bad in math ;)
You're making a LOT of big assumptions there, depending GREATLY on where you live:
So are you apparently.
Free electricity to fuel the Tesla
Not unless you live in a city where Tesla is providing free chargers. I don't, and I'm pretty sure my power company won't just give it to me for free if I tell them I'm a Tesla owner.
Well 20 eur a month is close enough to free compared to 220 eur a month that I pay right now.
$5/gallon for gasoline
More like $3.50 here.
More like $7 here (1.4 eur / liter).
Cost of maintenance for both cars is similar
Wow, that is a BIG assumption right there. Pretty sure a Tesla dealership is going to charge considerably more for maintenance than a local garage. And very few local garages around here can work on Teslas.
I think by maintenance he meant the (semi-)annual maintenance that all cars go through. Tesla actually publishes the cost on their website. If you pay in advance for four years I think it was 2000 eur total. So 500 eur / year. I can guarantee the breaks, oils, filters and what not that are done on any modern car usually cost above that in maintenance. Repairs are a different topic altogether and should mostly be covered by insurance or warranty.
Also, Elon Musk has stated that the service centers MUST NOT EVER earn profit. They must repair and maintain the Model S at the lowest possible cost while giving the customer the best experience. Tesla gets its profit from sales to end users and other manufacturers, it does not plan to earn profit from service work. This is a major disruption to the usual business model where dealerships earn little in the car sales (hence the low margin business) and earn shitloads in service work. As an example, the local Mitsubishi dealership is 2-3x more expensive than the rally team that I know who rebuilds their Evo X daily. They order the parts from the same central warehouses in EU, doubt that the labor is cheaper, but the repairs are far far cheaper in total when done at the rally shop. So yes, the maintenance is actually going to be cheaper for Model S than for any brand new car that you service at the dealership, not your uncle Joe's garage (here for example that's a requirement for warranty as well as leasing).
The Tesla battery lasts for 10 years + 150,000 miles
You ever had a cellphone battery last for 10 years without degrading?
Sorry, but color me skeptical.
From what I have understood the comparison isn't viable. Industrial grade batteries supposedly have less degradation and the battery LiIon battery lasts best when on average between 30-80% full and has daily usage. Tesla battery warranty for 85kW model (the one I'm planning) is 8 years unlimited miles. The various statements I've heard are that the battery is designed in normal use to have above 70% remaining capacity after 7 years. That is a pretty neat. You'll probably have shitload of car issues in those 7 years with your ICE and drivetrain. I've for example already had to swap the clutch assembly on my Evo X and the estimate is that this is once every 3 years or so. The cost of that is in thousands + labor cost (it's a full day of dismantling and rebuilding). The Model S doesn't even have a clutch.
So if you want to buy an el cheapo ICE, go ahead. If you want to buy a decent luxury performance car, then there is no better car in the world right now than the Model S. From performance and handling stats it's gonna smoke most all the luxury cars and a huge amount of the performance/sports cars. It'll give tough competition to even some supercars. From luxury point of view it has far more space than most cars and it's cheap to own and maintain. Also, as you can use regen breaking most of the time it's one pedal driving and you won't wear through the breaks as fast as with ICE cars, again reducing costs even if not as much as some other elements.
I just did a total cost of ownership calculation for a Model S and it's cheapish. Here in Estonia the highest cost will come from insurance because Tesla doesn't have a service center in the country, once that's alleviated in some way and the insurance comes down from the currently ridiculous 6500-8500 eur / year to a more reasonable 1000-1500 eur / year (mostly driven by car price) the Model S will be cheaper than most cars in its own class. The competing car I chose is the Audi A5 / S5 or similar. The cost of owning the car including financing, "fuel", service and insurance is the same as Model S 85kW model EVEN with the absurd insurance cost. If the insurance drops to compatible levels (and it is in countries where Tesla has a service center) then the Model S is far cheaper to own for TCO per annum.
Now if you compare it to crap like an Accord, then of course you can claim that those are cheaper, but that's not the target segment. To be fair the Model S 60 kW version is comparable in TCO to a car ca 20-30k eur cheaper due to low to no fuel costs compared to what we pay for gasoline here in EU. And I only calculated in my average usage of 12 000 km / year. If you drive more the discrepancy will only enhance. I'm currently driving a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X, a rally car. The total cost of ownership in the last 12 months was higher than the Model S mostly because of the fact that after 5 years of use the Evo X repairs are picking up (a simple 4-wheel drive pump cost 3000 eur, suspension replacement cost another few k etc). Even without the repairs it's only the insurance that makes a difference and the Evo X is worth only 24k eur while the Model S in EU costs far more than in US (80k for 60kW, 90k eur for 85kW with VAT). The good part is that in Estonia we have government incentives of size 18k eur that you get for an electric and we have charging stations within maximum 40km anywhere you are.
So all-in-all my next car is a Tesla, only thing that I need to do now is get some further replies from them and finalize the financing etc (and I really need to lobby the insurance to reduce their cost).
It's not actually hard to cite. Just google Model S review and you'll get plenty and the reasons are fairly obvious. The Model S has been designed for aerodynamics to reduce the air drag mostly for lower energy cost and therefore increased milage, but that also improves handling at higher speeds. For lower and higher speeds the main thing however is the extremely low center of gravity. During the safety tests they had to cheat because none of their standard methods was able to make the Model S roll over due to the extremely low center of gravity. It's competing in the supercar category with it and it's 100% due to choice of location for battery pack that is the heaviest component in the car. Low center of gravity as well as center-car center of mass (there's no huge mass offsetting the mass center like in ICE cars and the battery pack is uniform in the floor) give excellent turning capabilities. Also, the stock 19" or higher wheels come with good tires that add to the handling, but that's something most manufacturers could do. The excellent mass placement however is almost impossible to achieve in an ICE due to the engine throwing off the balance (hence most supercars are center-engine type for handling and mass distribution).
Yes it is. mr X does exchange and reveals his wallet address. Therefore you can track said wallets balance and transactions. However said person X or maybe in fact any number of persons could easily obfuscate everything by creating 10K addresses and randomly moving the money around between them. If they collect on 100 addresses and use 10K to obfuscate it's about as close to anonymous you can get.
I'll bite, what part of SpaceX doesn't fit for you? The NASA contract helped things along faster, but Elon's been claiming it only changed the dates when their goals were reached. They were doing well even without and would've gotten to where they are, just later...
You forget the matter / wave duality. An electron orbiting a nucleus is a standing wave. There is no moving electron, just a quantum system with an oscillation energy defined by QM. You cannot claim accelerating motion hence no bremsshtralung hence no crash.
Being a Mac user I'd happily trade one of the USB ports of my 2010 MBP for a Thunderbolt port for external display daisy chaining. The laptop's still good enough that I've not had the heart to upgrade to a newer one, but Thunderbolt and retina display are the two big items in my next laptop wishlist.
From what I've understood from Tim's interviews on this topic (and he's asked that frequently) is not the point of taxes or more expensive workforce. It's the lack of expertise. You guys don't seem to have enough experts to do the R&D and product and material development because of reducing standards in education in comparison to China. Sure they could do the final assembly by drones in US, but why do all the production of high end components in asia, then send the items to US for assembly and then distribute globally. And they do have some parts made in US already (wasn't the gorilla glass part a US development or smth similar).
So according to Tim there aren't enough experts in material science etc to build the factories and keep developing them in comparison. That's the bottom line. Not the assembly line drones. There are plenty of those globally, currently employed by fast food restaurants.
Why do you claim that they should have lost the vehicle? A failure of one engine out of 9 is something that the system was designed to handle. And the fact that it was designed to handle this doesn't mean that it's considered normal operation. Your car has an airbag designed to handle an accident, this doesn't mean that accidents will be normal operation.
In fact as mentioned multiple times already the Falcon 9 switches off two rockets at a late phase of the launch to avoid exceeding 5g acceleration, therefore the loss of one subengine wouldn't cause a loss of vehicle.
Yes, they will investigate it thoroughly and understand what was the cause and wether it needs fixing (1C will only make one more flight afaik) or if this has already been addressed in Merlin 1-D or Merlin 2, but in no way should you claim that the vehicles success was a crazy luck accident.
No, but those were really and truly crap for browsing. I was an early adopter and all the treos etc in the world couldn't compete or truly be well usable. Their screens were of crappy quality, low res and only half of the device due to keyboards. If you want to call that browsing, then good luck...
On what? Pre-iPhone you were hard pressed in finding a decent device to actually look at sites on...
Not sure. Terminal velocity is determined by air resistance. The surface area of a Cray2 is larger therefore it'd probably fall slower assuming the iPad managed to keep the sharp surface pointed towards the ground. Of course if the iPad went nicely flat it may well have a relative resistive surface that's larger so block better. Hmm... This isn't that trivial to solve I think. We need an experiment.
In estonia the iPhone package is 44 eur giving you the 4S for free (16GB), 100 min, 60 sms, 500MB data for 24 months.
If you take the same conditions without the phone it's ca 15 eur/month so the 30 eur/month is the phone fee. So buying it out vs contract does give a difference here...
Got an iPhone 4 and planning to upgrade. For me the 4S wasn't a large enough upgrade to go with it, but I do feel the lack of siri as a point. Now with iPhone 5 i also get added benefits in slightly larger screen (thank god it's not as huge as SIII has), the performance snappiness, the camera upgrade and a number of iOS upgrades that do not come to iPhone 4. And at least in Estonia the LTE speed is quite decent so that's added value as well. Also, I can sell the iPhone 4 for about half of the iPhone 5 cost making it a reasonable upgrade without a contractual need.
The heck are you speaking? I'm maintaining a huge datacenter and partook in the Higgs discovery using a MacBook Pro. What is it in a full Linux distro that is so needed that you need a Linux/Windows VM? I write python and C code for both simulationdata mining and visualization and it works fluently in OS X.