electric motors are extremely reliable, there is no transmission, no clutch, there are no fluids to change, no exhaust system... the car is just so darned simple that there's hardly anything that can go wrong.
I agree with you on the electric motors. There are motors still in service use that date back to when Edison was alive. However, there are some fluids in the vehicle such as brake fluid and lubing, but assuming you're not abusing them, brakes designed for service use on IC vehicles are insane overkill for a vehicle with regenerative braking, making them effectively lifetime.
Canadians, rich or otherwise, generally come to the USA for health care for the same reasons somebody might go to another state for care - excessively specialized treatment, or it's just closer/more convenient than the closest Canadian provider. Canada generally pays for the treatment in those cases.
For duty up in northern-tier areas I've suggested installing a small hydrocarbon fueled heating system. Rather than only utilizing *waste* heat, it should be possible to provide the heat at around 80% efficiency.
Actually I've heard the PTSD can be even worse - the human brain is apparently not that well suited to killing people 8-to-5 and then going home to the wife and kids who can't relate at all.
Makes me wonder if this also affects police officers. Not so much the killing part, but the confrontations/low to medium danger level incidents.
Once the military figures out that they can get socially maladjusted people to fly the drones, they'll have no problems, because such people couldn't care less about killing "ragheads" or whoever the "bad guy of the week" happens to be.
Maybe fewer problems with PTSD, but one needs to remember that the military isn't just about violence, it's about controlled violence.
You get somebody who doesn't care, much less enjoys it, and you increase the already present problems of uncontrolled or misdirected violence. And that costs more than a few cases of PTSD. I mean, besides the waste of drone time and the cost of the munitions you also have destroyed property that you end up paying for, medical bills for the survivors, settlements with the families of the deceased, lowered public perception, protests and sanctions from other governments*, etc...
*For example, something as simple as denying the US Navy access to a port can cost us MILLIONS in shipping and resupply costs.
The volt is a hybrid, I'd actually say that the Volt is more competing with Priuses and such.
But yeah, I only commute 10 miles to work, but it's more like 20 minimum on the weekends, so the Leaf just doesn't have enough range. It's range is so limited it's more of a stepped up electric golf cart that's popular in a number of retirement communities down in Florida than a regular car.
Double the range and I think you'd see a lot more sales.
By that logic, any act that has a reasonable expectation of shortening one's life is "suicide".
I think you misunderstood what I said - I said 'Translation issues' for a reason, it's not just word translation, there are cultural terms in there to be aware of. The proposed trip to Mars was a one way trip with insufficient supplies. As in, everybody would die unless some agency managed to get additional supplies and equipment to them within a relatively tight period of time(for interplanetary travel). You have a better chance of winning the lottery than surviving that.
Climbing Mt Everest and going to the ISS are both hazardous, but you do have a reasonable expectation that you'll come back alive. It makes a critical, critical difference.
I think that the idea is that while visiting the ISS is 'hazardous', there's a lot of hazardous things out there, the religion doesn't forbid hazardous. What it forbids is outright suicide. Join an expedition to reach the top of Everest without a plan to return? That's suicide. Riding a russian rocket up to the ISS? Let's call it a 1% chance of death. Dangerous, but not suicide. For that matter, sacrificing yourself for others (war, evacuation and such) isn't considered suicide either, even if death is certain.
As for the Martian Muslims, it depends on which sect they belong to - the simplistic method is simply to pray facing the Earth, but there's something forbidding praying towards the sun(so when Mars and the Earth are on opposite sides...). Then there's the fact that they don't actually use a straight line calculation, they use the shortest route, which means using a circle route on earth... Alaskan Muslims pray pretty much straight north because of that. Also means that you have an actual direction rather than 'into the ground' while on the opposite side of the planet. But when on mars it'd likely be the retrograde orbit to reach Earth.
Assuming significant colonization of mars by practicing Muslims, I wouldn't be surprised if some leader there just declares a 'Spiritual Martian Mecca' on Mars for them to face when praying.
Oh, and there's the clarification that if you're spending more worry about which direction to pray in than the prayer itself, you're doing it wrong and that there's an 'any' option in that case. Oh, and you shouldn't change facing during the prayer, even if Mecca is going to pull a 180(start facing towards, end facing away) during that time. Figure out the direction in an expedient fashion(computers are allowed) and pray.
It does sound pretty flimsy as an argument. But keep in mind that current one-way plans to go to Mars really haven't even gotten to the Power Point stage yet. They don't really have a lot of incentive to burn brain power on this. I suspect this is a nice way to say, "please don't fall for these scams".
I think there's translation issues, but what it amounts to is that the proposed mars journey is not only effectively one way, they're also not hauling enough supplies for you to live the rest of your life.
So rather than living to ~70 or so minimum, assuming no accident takes you out earlier, you're going on a trip with no real scientific value other than studying how you end up croaking, where your life on mars maxes out at around 3-5 years* from lift-off. You're not fighting a war, you're not dying to save others, etc...
Would the Fatwa have been issued if the proposal was 'The plan is to visit mars and come back, but we figure the odds are 50-50 that something will happen that we can't make it back, but in return we'll collect all this information that may help explorers in the future'? Maybe, maybe not. There's plenty of hazardous expeditions that Muslims have gone on without having a Fatwa issued against it - scaling Mount Everest, visiting the South/North pole, etc...
You do run into the problem of beam weight - you need the blades for each helicoptor far enough apart to not interfere with each other, but they also need to be physically tied together. As size goes up, so doesn't the length of the beam required, and to retain enough strength the weight of the beam tends to go up by the cube as length increases linerally.
You should be able to save some weight by removing sophisticated pitch control systems from the individual blades, as well as the tail rotors, but it's still going to be less efficient than a single rotor craft.
A full size helicopter with that many independent engines would be consigned to the 'heroic freaks of history' category, and probably never actually see use.
It's possible because they're relatively cheap modular electric motors. But 8 engined craft do exist(B-52), along with even crazier designs having existed in history.
But an 8 engined helicopter? You're right, that would be pretty crazy.
In addition, I'd rather have one of those drones crash than a helicoptor carrying pilot, cameraman, and such. The piloted craft is much larger and therefore more hazardous if something goes wrong(and it does semi-regularly).
Personally, I think any TSA employee in charge of TSA procedures needs to go through said procedure/screening every day before work.
Actually, they need to be fired and replaced by people with proper risk management training, as opposed to risk avoidance.
Risk Avoidance: Do everything in your power to prevent some risk, no matter the cost Risk Management: Assess the risk, consider the liklihood of the risk, the damage it will cost if it happens, then look at mitigations, how likely they are to work, how much they'll cost, etc... And make the cheapest decision. IE if on average the mitigation will prevent more loss than it costs, you impliment it. Otherwise you just accept the risk.
The CDC advice always left me a little annoyed since it's their life that they are risking by advising those allergic to eggs to get inoculated and now with the new vaccine I can finally get a flu shot without risking my life.
The advice I've always seen says that you may not be a candidate for it if you have an egg allergy, not recommending you get it despite an allergy.
People who have ever had a severe allergic reaction to eggs may be advised not to get vaccinated. People who have had a mild reaction to egg—that is, one which only involved hives—may receive a flu shot with additional precautions. Make sure your health care provider knows about any allergic reactions. Most, but not all, types of flu vaccine contain small amount of egg.
Yes, the pollution from horses, the support structure for horses, is a big part of what drove any option to not need a horse. Electric cable cars, for example. Cars vastly simplified the logistics(because you also needed to ship in ~50 pounds of fodder for said horses every day) as well.
That's the thing; nerds are interested in darn near everything.
The ability for a non-human disease to cause such a negative impact is interesting. The impact of loss of transportation on the economy, even an ancient one, is also interesting.
How are we doing on that war on cancer? How about the flu? Polio is still holding on in a few spots.
HIV is a retrovirus, it writes it into the cell's nucleas, even replicating as the cell replicates, until some event happens to cause the cell to start producing viral bodies again. It's basically a stealth virus.
It turns out that 'curing HIV' is bloody difficult. For that matter, just creating a vaccine for it is very difficult. Best study I remember thus far reduced the chance of infection by 50% - not enough to be viable, it needs to be above 90% to be considered an effective vaccine.
The mechanisions by which HIV causes AIDS(and not all cases of AIDS are caused by HIV) are at this point known, and it's part of the reason our drugs for it are as effective as they are, because we're targeting the virus directly.
those privately owned complexes are only profitable beyond a certain level of occupation.
Tell that to the prisons in Arizona. They have a guaranteed 100% occupancy rate - IE they get paid whether they have a prisoner or not. I'd LOVE to be paid for XXX prisoners that I don't actually have.
It's becoming a real issue with crime rates falling like a rock - states are having to 'scramble' to find enough prisoners to get their money's worth for those facilites. My opinion: Don't renew their contracts. Buy the facility, if it's worth it, for cheap some time later.
the owner believes he has hit his payday due to
being able to sue Tesla
holding off for a better "offer" from Tesla ( preventing bad publicity )
Perhaps, but it's a risky strategy. Judges tend to frown upon you refusing reasonable settlements ahead of time. Fixing the car&garage would count as a reasonable offer in most courts
Generally speaking if they make a reasonable offer, in this case fixing/replacing the car AND the garage, trying to extract more money out of them via the legal process is likely to backfire as judges frown upon people refusing reasonable restitution. What this translates into is that because the judge considers the court case unnecessary(you should have taken the offer), you don't get lawyer's fees. Tesla is still out the repair costs, but no more than their own lawyers on top of that. Which means you get very little money to fix your stuff after the lawyers take their share.
Now, as you say any waiver of responsibility(you agree that it wasn't Tesla's fault even if it was) might change that determination, but the idea makes me curious.
Do hub motors have a different efficiency profile?
They're generally slightly less efficient than the 3 phase induction motor in a Telsa, plus it also screws with the unsprung weight for the vehicle, which negatively affects handling and riding comfort. You also run into that 2 of them will weigh more than the Tesla's single motor(it's a RWD car, not AWD), much less 4.
There are a lot more electrical components only present in electric vehicles but which are not related to the charging, battery and electrical receptacle. There is the propulsion system, electrical convertors, motors at (I assume) all four wheels, then there is all kinds of geeky, energy wasting electronic gadgetry to display to the user how much energy they are saving.
You assume wrong. The Tesla has ONE motor that is connected to the wheels by a more or less normal transfer system. It's a 310kW 3 phase induction motor., rear motor rear wheel drive. I've even read that the motor only weighs 70 pounds.
As for the rest, the motor would presumably be unpowered at rest, and the electrical convertors would be, at first glance, part of the charging system. Thus unlikely to be the source of the fire.
Which is presumably why the Tesla engineers are so interested - they want to know what caused the fire more than anybody. They DO NOT want their cars to have any negative reputation.
Direct sales via post would solve a lot of their problems...
Not really. The cartels bring the stuff in by the semi-load. I half think that mules smuggling drugs through airports in various creative ways are the drug lord's entertainment. The amounts are ultimately pocket change, but give the drug enforcers somebody to catch, news stories and such, distracting attention away from the methods that really work for massive amounts of product, like the new tunnel authorities regularly find every 3-4 months. Thing is - most of the tunnels have probably been in operation for years before being found.
If they shift significantly to postal that simply means that the DEA and such can concentrate on that - interception would rise to unacceptable levels.
Slashdot Mirror
electric motors are extremely reliable, there is no transmission, no clutch, there are no fluids to change, no exhaust system... the car is just so darned simple that there's hardly anything that can go wrong.
I agree with you on the electric motors. There are motors still in service use that date back to when Edison was alive. However, there are some fluids in the vehicle such as brake fluid and lubing, but assuming you're not abusing them, brakes designed for service use on IC vehicles are insane overkill for a vehicle with regenerative braking, making them effectively lifetime.
The only thing worse than gear changes are gear changes done on a 3rd party's discretion.
Canadians, rich or otherwise, generally come to the USA for health care for the same reasons somebody might go to another state for care - excessively specialized treatment, or it's just closer/more convenient than the closest Canadian provider. Canada generally pays for the treatment in those cases.
For duty up in northern-tier areas I've suggested installing a small hydrocarbon fueled heating system. Rather than only utilizing *waste* heat, it should be possible to provide the heat at around 80% efficiency.
Actually I've heard the PTSD can be even worse - the human brain is apparently not that well suited to killing people 8-to-5 and then going home to the wife and kids who can't relate at all.
Makes me wonder if this also affects police officers. Not so much the killing part, but the confrontations/low to medium danger level incidents.
Once the military figures out that they can get socially maladjusted people to fly the drones, they'll have no problems, because such people couldn't care less about killing "ragheads" or whoever the "bad guy of the week" happens to be.
Maybe fewer problems with PTSD, but one needs to remember that the military isn't just about violence, it's about controlled violence.
You get somebody who doesn't care, much less enjoys it, and you increase the already present problems of uncontrolled or misdirected violence. And that costs more than a few cases of PTSD. I mean, besides the waste of drone time and the cost of the munitions you also have destroyed property that you end up paying for, medical bills for the survivors, settlements with the families of the deceased, lowered public perception, protests and sanctions from other governments*, etc...
*For example, something as simple as denying the US Navy access to a port can cost us MILLIONS in shipping and resupply costs.
The Leaf basically competes with the Volt
The volt is a hybrid, I'd actually say that the Volt is more competing with Priuses and such.
But yeah, I only commute 10 miles to work, but it's more like 20 minimum on the weekends, so the Leaf just doesn't have enough range. It's range is so limited it's more of a stepped up electric golf cart that's popular in a number of retirement communities down in Florida than a regular car.
Double the range and I think you'd see a lot more sales.
By that logic, any act that has a reasonable expectation of shortening one's life is "suicide".
I think you misunderstood what I said - I said 'Translation issues' for a reason, it's not just word translation, there are cultural terms in there to be aware of. The proposed trip to Mars was a one way trip with insufficient supplies. As in, everybody would die unless some agency managed to get additional supplies and equipment to them within a relatively tight period of time(for interplanetary travel). You have a better chance of winning the lottery than surviving that.
Climbing Mt Everest and going to the ISS are both hazardous, but you do have a reasonable expectation that you'll come back alive. It makes a critical, critical difference.
I think that the idea is that while visiting the ISS is 'hazardous', there's a lot of hazardous things out there, the religion doesn't forbid hazardous. What it forbids is outright suicide. Join an expedition to reach the top of Everest without a plan to return? That's suicide. Riding a russian rocket up to the ISS? Let's call it a 1% chance of death. Dangerous, but not suicide. For that matter, sacrificing yourself for others (war, evacuation and such) isn't considered suicide either, even if death is certain.
As for the Martian Muslims, it depends on which sect they belong to - the simplistic method is simply to pray facing the Earth, but there's something forbidding praying towards the sun(so when Mars and the Earth are on opposite sides...). Then there's the fact that they don't actually use a straight line calculation, they use the shortest route, which means using a circle route on earth... Alaskan Muslims pray pretty much straight north because of that. Also means that you have an actual direction rather than 'into the ground' while on the opposite side of the planet. But when on mars it'd likely be the retrograde orbit to reach Earth.
Assuming significant colonization of mars by practicing Muslims, I wouldn't be surprised if some leader there just declares a 'Spiritual Martian Mecca' on Mars for them to face when praying.
Oh, and there's the clarification that if you're spending more worry about which direction to pray in than the prayer itself, you're doing it wrong and that there's an 'any' option in that case. Oh, and you shouldn't change facing during the prayer, even if Mecca is going to pull a 180(start facing towards, end facing away) during that time. Figure out the direction in an expedient fashion(computers are allowed) and pray.
It does sound pretty flimsy as an argument. But keep in mind that current one-way plans to go to Mars really haven't even gotten to the Power Point stage yet. They don't really have a lot of incentive to burn brain power on this. I suspect this is a nice way to say, "please don't fall for these scams".
I think there's translation issues, but what it amounts to is that the proposed mars journey is not only effectively one way, they're also not hauling enough supplies for you to live the rest of your life.
So rather than living to ~70 or so minimum, assuming no accident takes you out earlier, you're going on a trip with no real scientific value other than studying how you end up croaking, where your life on mars maxes out at around 3-5 years* from lift-off. You're not fighting a war, you're not dying to save others, etc...
Would the Fatwa have been issued if the proposal was 'The plan is to visit mars and come back, but we figure the odds are 50-50 that something will happen that we can't make it back, but in return we'll collect all this information that may help explorers in the future'? Maybe, maybe not. There's plenty of hazardous expeditions that Muslims have gone on without having a Fatwa issued against it - scaling Mount Everest, visiting the South/North pole, etc...
*From what I've seen of the proposal.
You do run into the problem of beam weight - you need the blades for each helicoptor far enough apart to not interfere with each other, but they also need to be physically tied together. As size goes up, so doesn't the length of the beam required, and to retain enough strength the weight of the beam tends to go up by the cube as length increases linerally.
You should be able to save some weight by removing sophisticated pitch control systems from the individual blades, as well as the tail rotors, but it's still going to be less efficient than a single rotor craft.
A full size helicopter with that many independent engines would be consigned to the 'heroic freaks of history' category, and probably never actually see use.
It's possible because they're relatively cheap modular electric motors. But 8 engined craft do exist(B-52), along with even crazier designs having existed in history.
But an 8 engined helicopter? You're right, that would be pretty crazy.
In addition, I'd rather have one of those drones crash than a helicoptor carrying pilot, cameraman, and such. The piloted craft is much larger and therefore more hazardous if something goes wrong(and it does semi-regularly).
It can't just be the media though, as the media has been lambasting the TSA as too expensive for negligible effect for quite some time now.
I think what it's going to take is a new president to replace the head of the TSA with somebody else to force change from the top down.
Personally, I think any TSA employee in charge of TSA procedures needs to go through said procedure/screening every day before work.
Actually, they need to be fired and replaced by people with proper risk management training, as opposed to risk avoidance.
Risk Avoidance: Do everything in your power to prevent some risk, no matter the cost
Risk Management: Assess the risk, consider the liklihood of the risk, the damage it will cost if it happens, then look at mitigations, how likely they are to work, how much they'll cost, etc... And make the cheapest decision. IE if on average the mitigation will prevent more loss than it costs, you impliment it. Otherwise you just accept the risk.
The CDC advice always left me a little annoyed since it's their life that they are risking by advising those allergic to eggs to get inoculated and now with the new vaccine I can finally get a flu shot without risking my life.
The advice I've always seen says that you may not be a candidate for it if you have an egg allergy, not recommending you get it despite an allergy.
Right off the CDC site:
Special Consideration Regarding Egg Allergy:
People who have ever had a severe allergic reaction to eggs may be advised not to get vaccinated. People who have had a mild reaction to egg—that is, one which only involved hives—may receive a flu shot with additional precautions. Make sure your health care provider knows about any allergic reactions. Most, but not all, types of flu vaccine contain small amount of egg.
Yes, the pollution from horses, the support structure for horses, is a big part of what drove any option to not need a horse. Electric cable cars, for example. Cars vastly simplified the logistics(because you also needed to ship in ~50 pounds of fodder for said horses every day) as well.
That's the thing; nerds are interested in darn near everything.
The ability for a non-human disease to cause such a negative impact is interesting. The impact of loss of transportation on the economy, even an ancient one, is also interesting.
In other words we havent found it yet.
How are we doing on that war on cancer? How about the flu? Polio is still holding on in a few spots.
HIV is a retrovirus, it writes it into the cell's nucleas, even replicating as the cell replicates, until some event happens to cause the cell to start producing viral bodies again. It's basically a stealth virus.
It turns out that 'curing HIV' is bloody difficult. For that matter, just creating a vaccine for it is very difficult. Best study I remember thus far reduced the chance of infection by 50% - not enough to be viable, it needs to be above 90% to be considered an effective vaccine.
The mechanisions by which HIV causes AIDS(and not all cases of AIDS are caused by HIV) are at this point known, and it's part of the reason our drugs for it are as effective as they are, because we're targeting the virus directly.
those privately owned complexes are only profitable beyond a certain level of occupation.
Tell that to the prisons in Arizona. They have a guaranteed 100% occupancy rate - IE they get paid whether they have a prisoner or not. I'd LOVE to be paid for XXX prisoners that I don't actually have.
It's becoming a real issue with crime rates falling like a rock - states are having to 'scramble' to find enough prisoners to get their money's worth for those facilites. My opinion: Don't renew their contracts. Buy the facility, if it's worth it, for cheap some time later.
the owner believes he has hit his payday due to
being able to sue Tesla
holding off for a better "offer" from Tesla ( preventing bad publicity )
Perhaps, but it's a risky strategy. Judges tend to frown upon you refusing reasonable settlements ahead of time. Fixing the car&garage would count as a reasonable offer in most courts
Generally speaking if they make a reasonable offer, in this case fixing/replacing the car AND the garage, trying to extract more money out of them via the legal process is likely to backfire as judges frown upon people refusing reasonable restitution. What this translates into is that because the judge considers the court case unnecessary(you should have taken the offer), you don't get lawyer's fees. Tesla is still out the repair costs, but no more than their own lawyers on top of that. Which means you get very little money to fix your stuff after the lawyers take their share.
Now, as you say any waiver of responsibility(you agree that it wasn't Tesla's fault even if it was) might change that determination, but the idea makes me curious.
Do hub motors have a different efficiency profile?
They're generally slightly less efficient than the 3 phase induction motor in a Telsa, plus it also screws with the unsprung weight for the vehicle, which negatively affects handling and riding comfort. You also run into that 2 of them will weigh more than the Tesla's single motor(it's a RWD car, not AWD), much less 4.
There are a lot more electrical components only present in electric vehicles but which are not related to the charging, battery and electrical receptacle. There is the propulsion system, electrical convertors, motors at (I assume) all four wheels, then there is all kinds of geeky, energy wasting electronic gadgetry to display to the user how much energy they are saving.
You assume wrong. The Tesla has ONE motor that is connected to the wheels by a more or less normal transfer system. It's a 310kW 3 phase induction motor., rear motor rear wheel drive. I've even read that the motor only weighs 70 pounds.
As for the rest, the motor would presumably be unpowered at rest, and the electrical convertors would be, at first glance, part of the charging system. Thus unlikely to be the source of the fire.
Which is presumably why the Tesla engineers are so interested - they want to know what caused the fire more than anybody. They DO NOT want their cars to have any negative reputation.
Direct sales via post would solve a lot of their problems...
Not really. The cartels bring the stuff in by the semi-load. I half think that mules smuggling drugs through airports in various creative ways are the drug lord's entertainment. The amounts are ultimately pocket change, but give the drug enforcers somebody to catch, news stories and such, distracting attention away from the methods that really work for massive amounts of product, like the new tunnel authorities regularly find every 3-4 months. Thing is - most of the tunnels have probably been in operation for years before being found.
If they shift significantly to postal that simply means that the DEA and such can concentrate on that - interception would rise to unacceptable levels.