I rarely shop at the local CVS, but when I do the guy typically tells me I could have saved $$$ if I had a loyalty card. I just reply that that is the reason I hardly ever shop there.
Cheap is a relative term. Cheap in relation to what exactly? And frankly it doesn't matter. What matters is whether these long receipts are generating enough additional profits to justify printing them. If they result in additional sales which results in even modest additional profits then it's perhaps worthwhile. But perhaps they could generate the same results with less waste and thus less cost in a different way.
Honestly it seems pretty wasteful and I have a hard time imagining that they couldn't get the same results for less cost if they could be bothered to try.
A small risk of accidents and fatalities is an acceptable price for the freedom of driving, as it was for the freedom of riding for those before us. Reducing the risk by taking away the freedom is just not acceptable for many of us.
First off your argument that autonomous cars somehow reduce your freedom is nonsense. The freedom that cars provide is freedom of mobility which is in no way being threatened. If you enjoy driving that's fine but your freedom to drive isn't being impinged by autonomous vehicles also being on the road. Even if computers replaced all human drivers your freedom of mobility isn't being affected at all. The ONLY point is that YOU as a human driver are very likely a bigger threat to me (and vice versa) than these computer driven vehicles so arguments that they are risky is not supported by the data. At no point did I claim that we could/will/should remove human drivers from the roads.
Second, whether it is an acceptable price to pay is a decision we make as a society, not something you get to decide for the rest of us. 40,000 people died last year in the US alone from human driven vehicles and I'm pretty sure some of them and their loved ones might prefer a different outcome if we had the technology. If we replace the human drivers with computers and drop that number to a smaller number (maybe even zero) then you are going to have a VERY hard time arguing that huge body count is a worthwhile price to pay. The purpose of a car is to get from place to place - who is driving it is irrelevant. Just because we've had a body count in the past doesn't mean we need to continue to have one just so we can continue to prove that we humans are shitty drivers. We allow the current situation only because we don't really have a better option currently.
You can live in a padded room if you like, but don't impose it on others.
You misunderstand. I'm not arguing for the padded room. I'm arguing that the perception of autonomous vehicles as risky is not supported by the data so you can probably go out there without worrying about getting mowed down by one. In fact to date the data seems to indicate that they are at least as safe and probably safer than human driven vehicles so if you are being objective about it you should probably worry more about he human drivers than the computer ones.
This means that, pretty much, Waymo hasn't even covered a thousandth of a percent of the things it needs to cope with when driving.
Not even remotely true. Clearly they haven't come close to every corner case they could run into (they are still testing after all) but if their tech could handle as little as you claim then they couldn't be operated at all on roads of any description. Furthermore most humans are given a license to drive unsupervised well before they have seen all the problems they can run into. We don't even require that they be full grown adults and the "test" is frankly something of a joke.
And also... that if there is a single accident, that it would scale up 300,000-fold in terms of their overall average accident rate if we all jumped on board them. And Waymo's had quite a few.
That's not how statistical analysis works if you are doing it right. When you have a sample size that small you have to be very careful drawing conclusions about how representative it is of the actual risk. It might easily just be a fluke or some sort of random noise in the data. There would have to be a significant increase in the number of accidents to provide a basis for fair comparison. There have been precisely ZERO fatalities involving Waymo vehicles to date versus approximately 40,000 deaths from human driven vehicles in the US alone in 2017. Granted the Waymo vehicles are operating under more restrictions but I'd call that a promising start.
Additionally, what they have been doing is a clinical trial on non-volunteers-- everyone who intersects their roadways. That's really really bad.
Disagree. One only has to look at the accident record of human drivers versus autonomous vehicles to see who is currently leading the standings to be the most dangerous. (spoiler: humans have the bigger body count by a wide margin) Quite honestly I trust Waymo more than I trust you (or any other human - it's nothing personal) to operate a vehicle safely based on the available data. My chances of getting killed by a human driver are FAR higher. Anyway it doesn't matter to a dead person whether the driver is human or computer. I didn't consent to you driving your car either for whatever purpose you have either so it's not clear to me how that is in any way logically any different.
In any case I think your analogy to informed consent is incorrect. Informed consent is to ensure you are aware of the dangers you might be facing when you might not be otherwise clear. It also is to prevent people from being coerced into a potentially dangerous therapy involuntarily. That does not apply here. Your decision to go on or near a road with other vehicles is voluntary and I'm quite certain you are well aware of the likely dangers. A computer driving a car instead of a human does not meaningfully alter the nature of the dangers you will face nor will it meaningfully change how you react to them.
But no one is going to see a 65 MPH speed limit sign on a residential road and believe it
Neither will a properly programmed computer. It will know it isn't on a road where that sort of speed is appropriate. In fact the computer probably will be cross referencing in real time what the sign says with one or more GPS maps that tells it what the expected speed limit on a road should be. Human's can't do that sort of real time cross referencing - we just have to use our experience and heuristic problem solving.
Even if they put 3 trillion miles on their system, if they confine it to just a few geographical areas, I don't trust it very much.
Why? Human drivers are demonstrably dangerous and the body count to date heavily favors the computers as the likely safer option. While I'm not suggesting autonomous driving vehicles are ready for prime time yet or that it's a slam dunk that they are safer, I think people like yourself are not really doing a very good job of evaluating the actual risk data. Honestly I don't really trust YOU as a driver either. Nothing personal - you shouldn't trust me either or any other human driver. But the point is that what you should trust is the data and the data so far seems promising with regards to the safety of these things.
I've got just one question to ask: has Google finally solved image recognition and I'm not talking about simple cases - I'm talking about deliberate fakes, bad weather conditions, etc.
If they had completely solved such problems one would assume they would be bringing the technology to market for sale. So the answer is obviously that they have solved some problems but not all the problems. Human drivers have problems with bad weather and deliberate fakes too. Although be honest, when was the last time you saw an actual deliberate fake sign? Computers actually could be less susceptible to these since they can reference map databases about what speed limits etc should be for a given location whereas a human driver cannot do that sort of cross referencing while driving.
These issues can easily make your car software make life threatening decisions.
Human drivers make life threatening decisions daily. I'm not really sure what your point is. It makes no difference to a dead person whether the driver that caused the accident was human or computer and to date the human drivers have a FAR larger body count. I think the score is several million dead from human drivers to approximately zero for computer drivers.
But it's worth keeping things in perspective: U.S. drivers rack up some 3 trillion miles each year, so Waymo still has some ground to cover.
Umm, WTF does this have to do with "keeping perspective"? It isn't a competition between Waymo and the rest of us human drivers to see who can rack up the most miles driven.
I noticed this too. Maybe the timing was just coincidental, and maybe it wasn't. I tend to believe the latter.
As much as I think Pai and Trump are weapons grade asshats, I don't think this particular problem can be laid at their feet. I think it's almost certainly just coincidental timing. Now what IS their fault is the fact they haven't done much about it but even then for things like this that is probably just a case of the wheels of government moving slowly.
I just can't deal with it any more. Went to white listing. Any number not in contacts gets silently sent to voicemail. Most of them don't leave messages so that's manageable for now.
I use a voice mail service and route all calls to that. The one I use actually keeps a list of such callers and proactively blocks them - giving them a Not In Service message if they do actually get to voice mail. I black list any such numbers so I only ever get a call from them once plus I report them to the voice mail service to help others - akin to how spam filter reporting works. It's extremely rare at this point for me to answer a call from a number not already in my phone's address book. Plus the service has a few other features I find personally useful (your mileage may vary).
I presume this is so they are not putting all their eggs into one basket, especially as Musk is (dare I say it) a high risk investment.
The eggs in one basket thing I agree but I think you are hugely overstating the risk Musk as an individual brings to the table. Yeah he isn't the usual mold of CEO (not a bad thing IMO) and he obviously has an appetite for risk greater than most but it's kind of hard to argue that SpaceX isn't a very well run company. The military already does quite a lot of work with SpaceX which is prima facie evidence they aren't bothered much if at all by Musk.
I am surprised that none of the above seeks to advance booster technology significantly, such as (for example) trying to get a viable booster powered by an aerospike engine.
Why should that be surprising? Such advancements are (generally) hugely expensive and that isn't what the military is trying to accomplish here. While the military isn't the most price sensitive customer out there (obviously) they do have budgets and price still does matter plus as you rightly point out they don't want to just have a single supplier of boosters for a variety of fairly self evident reasons. I'm sure the military is investing in advanced propulsion systems somewhere - just not here.
No career military type is going to risk their future on an unstable madman.
Yet they currently have one as their commander in chief so there is some irony for you...
Seriously though, I doubt Elon Musk's (rather mild) eccentricities had much of anything to do with these contracts. The military already does lots of work with SpaceX. I suspect they are probably trying to ensure there is some competition in the market and SpaceX seems to not need a whole lot of help at this point. I would imagine the Air Force would rather not be limited to a single vendor because SpaceX drove the others out of business.
Which is why it's baffling to me that they only included one rear camera.
The answer to that is obvious - they are catering to the selfie crowd.
Rear cameras are for serious photography. Front cameras are just for cutesy stuff.
"Serious photography"? I guess it depends on what you mean by the word serious. I use my smartphone camera a lot and it takes good pictures but the optics in any of them cannot get as good an image (usually) as I can with the glass in my "real" camera. Beyond a certain point you need bigger/better glass to get better images. My That said my smartphone is (usually) FAR easier to use and more portable than carrying around a several point and bulky DSLR. I think the "real" cameras have a lot they should be learning from smartphones, particular with regard to user interface and image sharing and networking. They take great pictures (if you know what you are doing) but the user interface and image management are WAY behind state of the art.
What I'd like to see is a detachable battery case with some better camera optics (modular so you aren't tied to a specific phone model). I can't always carry around a dedicated camera but I usually can carry around a thicker phone.
Currently I use YouMail but there are other equivalent services out there. I have no relationship with YouMail except as a reasonably satisfied customer and there may be better options available. I haven't actually listened to a voice mail in quite a long time. The automated transcriptions are usually good enough to get the gist of what is being said. It also let's me assign different voice messages to different callers so my wife gets a nice friendly custom greeting whereas someone from work might get a more serious greeting and telemarketers get a "the number you have dialed is no longer in service" message.
I've also used Google Voice in the past as well but it's not actively being developed that I can tell.
Whenever someone calls you, you can tap a "Screen call" button, and a robot voice will pick up. "The person you're calling is using a screening service, and will get a copy of this conversation.
I've had this feature for ages with a voicemail service and it doesn't even require action on my part. I just don't answer the call. If it's a known telemarketer or scam it will be automatically blocked and receive a recording indicating that the number is no longer in service. If they leave a message I get a transcript of the message they leave and can respond (or not) at my convenience. I very rarely answer my phone if it is a number not already in my address book. Spam calls get added to a blacklist which is then shared with other users of the service similar to email spam filters.
This feature from Google sounds fine but it also sounds like unnecessary work. I'd rather just not answer the call since that is less work for me.
Physicists from the University of Twente in the Netherlands decided to analyze the underlying physics [of flipping a half-full bottle of water so it lands upright] more thoroughly in a series of rigorous experiments and develop a theoretical model.
I sense they are gunning for an Ig Nobel Prize with this critical and ground breaking research.
Thus, instead of using graphene just as some structured base material, it may make a lot of sense to actually build the electronic circuit itself from graphene.
That's great. Wake me when we actually make something useful with graphene that I can actually buy or use instead of just talking about what a miracle material it is. We keep seeing all sorts of articles about how great it is and yet nobody seems to how to actually do anything useful with it outside of a laboratory.
Long distance commercial flights have a good safety record (fatalities per mile) because only a small proportion of their travel is spent in take-off and landing; such flights have a safety record similar to trains (West European trains anyway).
There is no single reason why commercial aviation has the safety record it does. You correctly identified ONE of the factors but there are many others including but not limited to: strong safety regulations, a strong regulatory body (FAA), a strong safety culture, well trained pilots and ground control who have to demonstrate a high level of competence, extensive testing and maintenance requirements, there is little chance of hitting something during travel especially another vehicle, airplane design, cockpit technology, airport design, and more.
Trains are measurably less safe than commercial aviation (for a variety of reasons) but still incredibly safe overall - probably the second safest means of travel. And for short to medium length journeys trains can be notably more economical if the rail system is designed appropriately like in Europe or Japan. (US passenger rail sucks in most places) Plus trains can go places where airplanes generally cannot like city centers and underground.
That changes however if aircraft are used for short trips, especially private ones, because proportionately more take off and landing is involved.
It's true that more takeoffs and landings will almost certainly increase the casualty rate for aviation by some amount. The exact amount is obviously unclear but the number would be expected to be >0. However it is unlikely that we are going to see a significant increase in general aviation and private aircraft use since the cost is so great.
That would be even more so with the use (and maintenance) that flying cars are likely to get.
Stop. Just stop. Flying cars are NOT a thing. They will NEVER be a thing. There is no point in even discussing them or their hypothetical safety record. If there is some breakthrough that makes them feasible then and only then can we have this discussion.
Clearly you have no idea what we spend building roads, or the cost of highway fatalities.
You think putting autonomous piloting tech into planes will change either of those things in the slightest? Air travel is already FAR safer than driving and yet we still drive far more than we fly because safety isn't the only or even the paramount concern. You think planes are are going to become magically able to land where cars do and that some miracle will occur to make them affordable by people who aren't crazy rich? Air travel isn't going to replace cars and no amount of wishful thinking will make it otherwise.
meanwhile in the real word real research is happening by Boeing's competitors
You specifically claimed that Boeing was spending billions on R&D for this stuff and then failed to back up that assertion. Now you are talking about Boeing's competition? (who you also fail to establish is spending "billions" on this stuff) That's called moving the goal posts my friend.
So keep thinking it'll never happen
The only think I claimed will never happen is FLYING CARS which is absolutely true because physics is a bitch that way. You linked to a research project about a type of drone airplane being used as a taxi. Planes are already used as taxis today. The only difference here is that a human is not the pilot. Cool stuff but not a flying car. Do you understand the difference between a car and a taxi? Cars can be taxis but so can boats, airplanes, helicopters or bicycles. A taxi is a type of service not a type of vehicles. When an uber driver is driving themselves their car is not a taxi.
It's even better when you consider the fact that you can fly straight lines instead of winding paths, which cuts down on distance as compared to a car.
That's only true if you restrict your travel path to nothing but airports. If you want to actually go anywhere that is not an airport you aren't likely going there in a straight line no matter what vehicle you choose. Cars in general can get a LOT closer to their ultimate destination than any aircraft in most circumstances.
Nor do you have to waste fuel accelerating and decelerating at lights, or in bumper to bumper traffic.
No instead you have to drive to an airport, fly to another airport (which may or may not be close to where you want to go) and then drive to your ultimate destination. Calling that point to point travel is not even remotely accurate. Aircraft which can actually fly point to point (basically helicopters) is going to be quite inefficient in use of fuel compared to the alternatives.
Getting into the air doesn't have to use huge amounts of energy; it just depends on how you're generating lift.
Flying is (relatively) energy efficient in some use cases but not all. The real question isn't can you get the vehicle into the air. The question is how much cargo can the vehicle carry (including people) for a given amount of energy and then can you utilize that cargo capacity efficiently. Also there is the questions of how far you are traveling and how fast you need to get there. For long distance travel in short time periods it's hard to beat airplanes. But if you can take a bit more time or if the trip is relatively short there are usually more energy efficient means of travel.
The Pipistrel Alpha Electro (the world's first mass-produced electric plane) has running costs (energy, mantenance) one fifth of the gasoline-powered version.
Citation needed. That plane can stay in the air all of 60 minutes. A typical small plane like a Cessna can stay aloft 4-6 hours and carry more cargo. Even the company's website says it is "optimized for traffic pattern operations" which is PR speak for it can take off and circle the airport and that's about it.
In any case this has nothing at all to do with autonomous piloting systems which have no inherent relationship to the type of power used to propel the aircraft. ICE, jet, EV, etc doesn't matter for purposes of steering.
Hmm I wonder if Boeing even thought about these costs before they decided to spend billions of dollars on research down this road.
Please cite a document showing Boeing spent "billions" on this specific research. They do spend billions on R&D ($3.1 billion in 2017) but most of it is for other projects. For example they spent $29 billion on R&D for the 787 program alone. I've seen no evidence that this is anything other than PR puffery.
I guess it's just something an army of engineers don't think about when they are designing a new product to sell in the marketplace?
Unwad your panties. There is a financial reason to develop technology to fly vehicles autonomously - just not the ones cited in the article - that "justification" is pure marketing BS. Flying cars are not a thing and probably never will be. Flying taxis are already a thing and there might be some marginal benefit to autonomous piloting but it isn't going to be a game changer economically - most of the costs are unrelated to piloting. Safety is important and airlines will be happy to cut costs anywhere they can if there are savings to be had. Furthermore Boeing makes both civilian and military aircraft and there are obvious military applications for this sort of tech. Autonomous piloting has some obvious advantages if done properly but pilot salaries are reportedly somewhere around 4%-8% of the cost of operating an aircraft.
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I rarely shop at the local CVS, but when I do the guy typically tells me I could have saved $$$ if I had a loyalty card. I just reply that that is the reason I hardly ever shop there.
And not a single fuck was given by the cashier.
Wrong audience for that message.
Thermal paper rolls are cheap.
Cheap is a relative term. Cheap in relation to what exactly? And frankly it doesn't matter. What matters is whether these long receipts are generating enough additional profits to justify printing them. If they result in additional sales which results in even modest additional profits then it's perhaps worthwhile. But perhaps they could generate the same results with less waste and thus less cost in a different way.
Honestly it seems pretty wasteful and I have a hard time imagining that they couldn't get the same results for less cost if they could be bothered to try.
A small risk of accidents and fatalities is an acceptable price for the freedom of driving, as it was for the freedom of riding for those before us. Reducing the risk by taking away the freedom is just not acceptable for many of us.
First off your argument that autonomous cars somehow reduce your freedom is nonsense. The freedom that cars provide is freedom of mobility which is in no way being threatened. If you enjoy driving that's fine but your freedom to drive isn't being impinged by autonomous vehicles also being on the road. Even if computers replaced all human drivers your freedom of mobility isn't being affected at all. The ONLY point is that YOU as a human driver are very likely a bigger threat to me (and vice versa) than these computer driven vehicles so arguments that they are risky is not supported by the data. At no point did I claim that we could/will/should remove human drivers from the roads.
Second, whether it is an acceptable price to pay is a decision we make as a society, not something you get to decide for the rest of us. 40,000 people died last year in the US alone from human driven vehicles and I'm pretty sure some of them and their loved ones might prefer a different outcome if we had the technology. If we replace the human drivers with computers and drop that number to a smaller number (maybe even zero) then you are going to have a VERY hard time arguing that huge body count is a worthwhile price to pay. The purpose of a car is to get from place to place - who is driving it is irrelevant. Just because we've had a body count in the past doesn't mean we need to continue to have one just so we can continue to prove that we humans are shitty drivers. We allow the current situation only because we don't really have a better option currently.
You can live in a padded room if you like, but don't impose it on others.
You misunderstand. I'm not arguing for the padded room. I'm arguing that the perception of autonomous vehicles as risky is not supported by the data so you can probably go out there without worrying about getting mowed down by one. In fact to date the data seems to indicate that they are at least as safe and probably safer than human driven vehicles so if you are being objective about it you should probably worry more about he human drivers than the computer ones.
This means that, pretty much, Waymo hasn't even covered a thousandth of a percent of the things it needs to cope with when driving.
Not even remotely true. Clearly they haven't come close to every corner case they could run into (they are still testing after all) but if their tech could handle as little as you claim then they couldn't be operated at all on roads of any description. Furthermore most humans are given a license to drive unsupervised well before they have seen all the problems they can run into. We don't even require that they be full grown adults and the "test" is frankly something of a joke.
And also... that if there is a single accident, that it would scale up 300,000-fold in terms of their overall average accident rate if we all jumped on board them. And Waymo's had quite a few.
That's not how statistical analysis works if you are doing it right. When you have a sample size that small you have to be very careful drawing conclusions about how representative it is of the actual risk. It might easily just be a fluke or some sort of random noise in the data. There would have to be a significant increase in the number of accidents to provide a basis for fair comparison. There have been precisely ZERO fatalities involving Waymo vehicles to date versus approximately 40,000 deaths from human driven vehicles in the US alone in 2017. Granted the Waymo vehicles are operating under more restrictions but I'd call that a promising start.
Additionally, what they have been doing is a clinical trial on non-volunteers-- everyone who intersects their roadways. That's really really bad.
Disagree. One only has to look at the accident record of human drivers versus autonomous vehicles to see who is currently leading the standings to be the most dangerous. (spoiler: humans have the bigger body count by a wide margin) Quite honestly I trust Waymo more than I trust you (or any other human - it's nothing personal) to operate a vehicle safely based on the available data. My chances of getting killed by a human driver are FAR higher. Anyway it doesn't matter to a dead person whether the driver is human or computer. I didn't consent to you driving your car either for whatever purpose you have either so it's not clear to me how that is in any way logically any different.
In any case I think your analogy to informed consent is incorrect. Informed consent is to ensure you are aware of the dangers you might be facing when you might not be otherwise clear. It also is to prevent people from being coerced into a potentially dangerous therapy involuntarily. That does not apply here. Your decision to go on or near a road with other vehicles is voluntary and I'm quite certain you are well aware of the likely dangers. A computer driving a car instead of a human does not meaningfully alter the nature of the dangers you will face nor will it meaningfully change how you react to them.
But no one is going to see a 65 MPH speed limit sign on a residential road and believe it
Neither will a properly programmed computer. It will know it isn't on a road where that sort of speed is appropriate. In fact the computer probably will be cross referencing in real time what the sign says with one or more GPS maps that tells it what the expected speed limit on a road should be. Human's can't do that sort of real time cross referencing - we just have to use our experience and heuristic problem solving.
Even if they put 3 trillion miles on their system, if they confine it to just a few geographical areas, I don't trust it very much.
Why? Human drivers are demonstrably dangerous and the body count to date heavily favors the computers as the likely safer option. While I'm not suggesting autonomous driving vehicles are ready for prime time yet or that it's a slam dunk that they are safer, I think people like yourself are not really doing a very good job of evaluating the actual risk data. Honestly I don't really trust YOU as a driver either. Nothing personal - you shouldn't trust me either or any other human driver. But the point is that what you should trust is the data and the data so far seems promising with regards to the safety of these things.
I've got just one question to ask: has Google finally solved image recognition and I'm not talking about simple cases - I'm talking about deliberate fakes, bad weather conditions, etc.
If they had completely solved such problems one would assume they would be bringing the technology to market for sale. So the answer is obviously that they have solved some problems but not all the problems. Human drivers have problems with bad weather and deliberate fakes too. Although be honest, when was the last time you saw an actual deliberate fake sign? Computers actually could be less susceptible to these since they can reference map databases about what speed limits etc should be for a given location whereas a human driver cannot do that sort of cross referencing while driving.
These issues can easily make your car software make life threatening decisions.
Human drivers make life threatening decisions daily. I'm not really sure what your point is. It makes no difference to a dead person whether the driver that caused the accident was human or computer and to date the human drivers have a FAR larger body count. I think the score is several million dead from human drivers to approximately zero for computer drivers.
But it's worth keeping things in perspective: U.S. drivers rack up some 3 trillion miles each year, so Waymo still has some ground to cover.
Umm, WTF does this have to do with "keeping perspective"? It isn't a competition between Waymo and the rest of us human drivers to see who can rack up the most miles driven.
All of these companies are old school contractors who have handfuls of ex military generals working for them.
Blue Origin is not even remotely an "old school contractor".
I noticed this too. Maybe the timing was just coincidental, and maybe it wasn't. I tend to believe the latter.
As much as I think Pai and Trump are weapons grade asshats, I don't think this particular problem can be laid at their feet. I think it's almost certainly just coincidental timing. Now what IS their fault is the fact they haven't done much about it but even then for things like this that is probably just a case of the wheels of government moving slowly.
I just can't deal with it any more. Went to white listing. Any number not in contacts gets silently sent to voicemail. Most of them don't leave messages so that's manageable for now.
I use a voice mail service and route all calls to that. The one I use actually keeps a list of such callers and proactively blocks them - giving them a Not In Service message if they do actually get to voice mail. I black list any such numbers so I only ever get a call from them once plus I report them to the voice mail service to help others - akin to how spam filter reporting works. It's extremely rare at this point for me to answer a call from a number not already in my phone's address book. Plus the service has a few other features I find personally useful (your mileage may vary).
I presume this is so they are not putting all their eggs into one basket, especially as Musk is (dare I say it) a high risk investment.
The eggs in one basket thing I agree but I think you are hugely overstating the risk Musk as an individual brings to the table. Yeah he isn't the usual mold of CEO (not a bad thing IMO) and he obviously has an appetite for risk greater than most but it's kind of hard to argue that SpaceX isn't a very well run company. The military already does quite a lot of work with SpaceX which is prima facie evidence they aren't bothered much if at all by Musk.
I am surprised that none of the above seeks to advance booster technology significantly, such as (for example) trying to get a viable booster powered by an aerospike engine.
Why should that be surprising? Such advancements are (generally) hugely expensive and that isn't what the military is trying to accomplish here. While the military isn't the most price sensitive customer out there (obviously) they do have budgets and price still does matter plus as you rightly point out they don't want to just have a single supplier of boosters for a variety of fairly self evident reasons. I'm sure the military is investing in advanced propulsion systems somewhere - just not here.
No career military type is going to risk their future on an unstable madman.
Yet they currently have one as their commander in chief so there is some irony for you...
Seriously though, I doubt Elon Musk's (rather mild) eccentricities had much of anything to do with these contracts. The military already does lots of work with SpaceX. I suspect they are probably trying to ensure there is some competition in the market and SpaceX seems to not need a whole lot of help at this point. I would imagine the Air Force would rather not be limited to a single vendor because SpaceX drove the others out of business.
Which is why it's baffling to me that they only included one rear camera.
The answer to that is obvious - they are catering to the selfie crowd.
Rear cameras are for serious photography. Front cameras are just for cutesy stuff.
"Serious photography"? I guess it depends on what you mean by the word serious. I use my smartphone camera a lot and it takes good pictures but the optics in any of them cannot get as good an image (usually) as I can with the glass in my "real" camera. Beyond a certain point you need bigger/better glass to get better images. My That said my smartphone is (usually) FAR easier to use and more portable than carrying around a several point and bulky DSLR. I think the "real" cameras have a lot they should be learning from smartphones, particular with regard to user interface and image sharing and networking. They take great pictures (if you know what you are doing) but the user interface and image management are WAY behind state of the art.
What I'd like to see is a detachable battery case with some better camera optics (modular so you aren't tied to a specific phone model). I can't always carry around a dedicated camera but I usually can carry around a thicker phone.
Name of the service?
Currently I use YouMail but there are other equivalent services out there. I have no relationship with YouMail except as a reasonably satisfied customer and there may be better options available. I haven't actually listened to a voice mail in quite a long time. The automated transcriptions are usually good enough to get the gist of what is being said. It also let's me assign different voice messages to different callers so my wife gets a nice friendly custom greeting whereas someone from work might get a more serious greeting and telemarketers get a "the number you have dialed is no longer in service" message.
I've also used Google Voice in the past as well but it's not actively being developed that I can tell.
Whenever someone calls you, you can tap a "Screen call" button, and a robot voice will pick up. "The person you're calling is using a screening service, and will get a copy of this conversation.
I've had this feature for ages with a voicemail service and it doesn't even require action on my part. I just don't answer the call. If it's a known telemarketer or scam it will be automatically blocked and receive a recording indicating that the number is no longer in service. If they leave a message I get a transcript of the message they leave and can respond (or not) at my convenience. I very rarely answer my phone if it is a number not already in my address book. Spam calls get added to a blacklist which is then shared with other users of the service similar to email spam filters.
This feature from Google sounds fine but it also sounds like unnecessary work. I'd rather just not answer the call since that is less work for me.
Physicists from the University of Twente in the Netherlands decided to analyze the underlying physics [of flipping a half-full bottle of water so it lands upright] more thoroughly in a series of rigorous experiments and develop a theoretical model.
I sense they are gunning for an Ig Nobel Prize with this critical and ground breaking research.
Thus, instead of using graphene just as some structured base material, it may make a lot of sense to actually build the electronic circuit itself from graphene.
That's great. Wake me when we actually make something useful with graphene that I can actually buy or use instead of just talking about what a miracle material it is. We keep seeing all sorts of articles about how great it is and yet nobody seems to how to actually do anything useful with it outside of a laboratory.
Long distance commercial flights have a good safety record (fatalities per mile) because only a small proportion of their travel is spent in take-off and landing; such flights have a safety record similar to trains (West European trains anyway).
There is no single reason why commercial aviation has the safety record it does. You correctly identified ONE of the factors but there are many others including but not limited to: strong safety regulations, a strong regulatory body (FAA), a strong safety culture, well trained pilots and ground control who have to demonstrate a high level of competence, extensive testing and maintenance requirements, there is little chance of hitting something during travel especially another vehicle, airplane design, cockpit technology, airport design, and more.
Trains are measurably less safe than commercial aviation (for a variety of reasons) but still incredibly safe overall - probably the second safest means of travel. And for short to medium length journeys trains can be notably more economical if the rail system is designed appropriately like in Europe or Japan. (US passenger rail sucks in most places) Plus trains can go places where airplanes generally cannot like city centers and underground.
That changes however if aircraft are used for short trips, especially private ones, because proportionately more take off and landing is involved.
It's true that more takeoffs and landings will almost certainly increase the casualty rate for aviation by some amount. The exact amount is obviously unclear but the number would be expected to be >0. However it is unlikely that we are going to see a significant increase in general aviation and private aircraft use since the cost is so great.
That would be even more so with the use (and maintenance) that flying cars are likely to get.
Stop. Just stop. Flying cars are NOT a thing. They will NEVER be a thing. There is no point in even discussing them or their hypothetical safety record. If there is some breakthrough that makes them feasible then and only then can we have this discussion.
Clearly you have no idea what we spend building roads, or the cost of highway fatalities.
You think putting autonomous piloting tech into planes will change either of those things in the slightest? Air travel is already FAR safer than driving and yet we still drive far more than we fly because safety isn't the only or even the paramount concern. You think planes are are going to become magically able to land where cars do and that some miracle will occur to make them affordable by people who aren't crazy rich? Air travel isn't going to replace cars and no amount of wishful thinking will make it otherwise.
meanwhile in the real word real research is happening by Boeing's competitors
You specifically claimed that Boeing was spending billions on R&D for this stuff and then failed to back up that assertion. Now you are talking about Boeing's competition? (who you also fail to establish is spending "billions" on this stuff) That's called moving the goal posts my friend.
So keep thinking it'll never happen
The only think I claimed will never happen is FLYING CARS which is absolutely true because physics is a bitch that way. You linked to a research project about a type of drone airplane being used as a taxi. Planes are already used as taxis today. The only difference here is that a human is not the pilot. Cool stuff but not a flying car. Do you understand the difference between a car and a taxi? Cars can be taxis but so can boats, airplanes, helicopters or bicycles. A taxi is a type of service not a type of vehicles. When an uber driver is driving themselves their car is not a taxi.
It's even better when you consider the fact that you can fly straight lines instead of winding paths, which cuts down on distance as compared to a car.
That's only true if you restrict your travel path to nothing but airports. If you want to actually go anywhere that is not an airport you aren't likely going there in a straight line no matter what vehicle you choose. Cars in general can get a LOT closer to their ultimate destination than any aircraft in most circumstances.
Nor do you have to waste fuel accelerating and decelerating at lights, or in bumper to bumper traffic.
No instead you have to drive to an airport, fly to another airport (which may or may not be close to where you want to go) and then drive to your ultimate destination. Calling that point to point travel is not even remotely accurate. Aircraft which can actually fly point to point (basically helicopters) is going to be quite inefficient in use of fuel compared to the alternatives.
Getting into the air doesn't have to use huge amounts of energy; it just depends on how you're generating lift.
Flying is (relatively) energy efficient in some use cases but not all. The real question isn't can you get the vehicle into the air. The question is how much cargo can the vehicle carry (including people) for a given amount of energy and then can you utilize that cargo capacity efficiently. Also there is the questions of how far you are traveling and how fast you need to get there. For long distance travel in short time periods it's hard to beat airplanes. But if you can take a bit more time or if the trip is relatively short there are usually more energy efficient means of travel.
The Pipistrel Alpha Electro (the world's first mass-produced electric plane) has running costs (energy, mantenance) one fifth of the gasoline-powered version.
Citation needed. That plane can stay in the air all of 60 minutes. A typical small plane like a Cessna can stay aloft 4-6 hours and carry more cargo. Even the company's website says it is "optimized for traffic pattern operations" which is PR speak for it can take off and circle the airport and that's about it.
In any case this has nothing at all to do with autonomous piloting systems which have no inherent relationship to the type of power used to propel the aircraft. ICE, jet, EV, etc doesn't matter for purposes of steering.
Hmm I wonder if Boeing even thought about these costs before they decided to spend billions of dollars on research down this road.
Please cite a document showing Boeing spent "billions" on this specific research. They do spend billions on R&D ($3.1 billion in 2017) but most of it is for other projects. For example they spent $29 billion on R&D for the 787 program alone. I've seen no evidence that this is anything other than PR puffery.
I guess it's just something an army of engineers don't think about when they are designing a new product to sell in the marketplace?
Unwad your panties. There is a financial reason to develop technology to fly vehicles autonomously - just not the ones cited in the article - that "justification" is pure marketing BS. Flying cars are not a thing and probably never will be. Flying taxis are already a thing and there might be some marginal benefit to autonomous piloting but it isn't going to be a game changer economically - most of the costs are unrelated to piloting. Safety is important and airlines will be happy to cut costs anywhere they can if there are savings to be had. Furthermore Boeing makes both civilian and military aircraft and there are obvious military applications for this sort of tech. Autonomous piloting has some obvious advantages if done properly but pilot salaries are reportedly somewhere around 4%-8% of the cost of operating an aircraft.