That's not a normal situation though - Last couple times I bought, they'd have dropped the price by a couple thousand if I could have paid cash in full.
It was probably more the way the dude's commission was set up, because otherwise I'd take the loan - then pay it off next month. Living in a state that forbids early payment penalties helps.
1. Not going to argue that cornfields have lower diversity 2. Did you miss my point that corn > biofuel = stupid? Though I dropped some words - 'OOM or so better'. 'stiff -> still' 3. Heck, I specified Ethanol as not a good fuel as well. 4. 'Mostly electric cars'
As the AC mentioned, Corn is far from the only potential biofuel. As I mentioned, the only reason it's the primary source here in the USA is the corn lobby. Algae working out or not, I hope they crack the problems with turning cellulose into Ethanol. Heck, I'd prefer if they could turn it into a gasoline analogue that isn't massively hygroscopic like high-purity alcohol.
Bio Fuels of this kind still require enormous effort and land areas to produce.
The whole point of something like this is to utilize waste, which means that we aren't giving up food production or having to cultivate more land in order to make the fuel. I'll agree that corn is stupid, but this is using wine waste - IE grape stuff. Most true environmentalists don't back corn at all, they know how stupid it is. However the corn lobby is powerful and has 'Environmentalists' on it's payroll. Ethanol production from corn has gotten a lot more efficient, but it needs to be an OOM or so, and a plant that can achieve that wouldn't be 'corn' anymore. I'm not convinced of ethanol's suitability as a fuel anyways.
I once saw a documentary about wolves establishing them selves in the area around Chernobyl. The wolves were thriving despite the high radiation levels. Without humans taking up land for agriculture an entire ecosystem established quickly, overcoming a nuclear disaster.
To be fair, 'high radiation levels' are relative. There's actually areas of higher natural radiation that have been occupied by humans for centuries. Radiation is a complex and stiff not fully understood science. Wolves give birth to multiple pups anyways, so as long as the birth defect rate is only a little higher, they can still survive just fine. They're also not living directly in the sarcophagus, unlike some birds. In the birds case though, often they'll lay 4-6 eggs only expecting 1 to survive - a deformed chick just means it's tossed out of the nest by competing chicks faster.
And it makes sense, for the first time all those little animals in the ecosystem had the space and place to live.
Hardly the 'first time', I'd think. They used to have it before humans came, before we developed agriculture, etc...
Where ever we plant corn, pretty much, nothing else can live. Nuclear energy and electric cars are the future. Nuclear energy production takes up very little space, and is by far, less destructive of the environment. Bio Fuels of this kind still require enormous effort and land areas to produce.
Plenty of wildlife can live around corn. Just ask the farmers about turkeys and deer. But I agree; we need something other than corn. Right now my theory is mostly electric cars backed up by biodiesel produced from algae farms in the desert for remaining liquid fuel needs.
And here I was thinking about an Ap: "If your phone is stolen our app will report it's location to our servers, at which point we'll send the information to one of our thousands of professional hitmen to kill the thief and retrieve your phone."
I'd respond to the other person who replied, but I don't reply to AC's directly: 'Connect to the phone'? This is a difficulty? It's a cell phone! Regular network contact is a matter of course, and we know that back doors exist for the cell carriers, and they bend over for law enforcement(especially if they have a warrant).
Even a 10% cost increase will result in a much smaller market for it. Modding a PS or XBox back in the day was fairly easy, only required a 'bit' of soldering, yet I can say that 99% of consoles were never modded*. It was a mostly effective level of protection.
Making unlocking a $600 cell phone require a couple hour's work and $100 of parts and such phones will mostly be safe from normal theft.
I doubt that happens very much at all, to the point that it'd probably be a major news item if it happens.
Why? 1. IMEI numbers are currently hard to guess. They're not simple 2. No gain on the part of a seller to block a phone they just sold - indeed, odds are that the buyer can track them down to demand a refund for a *STOLEN PHONE* 3. It takes work; Most people aren't that nasty 4. If they can get that close to the phone, they might as well steal it 5. Most people wouldn't think to do it. Even divorcing couples.
Especially your specifying 'second-hand' phones. Unless it's stolen I doubt the seller is going to care; wish you luck with your new(to you) phone.
Most intelligent city residents bother to keep the number of a good car service... I can remember "four ones" from growing up there, I'm sure similar companies exist nowadays.
That reminds me - while medallion taxis are the only ones legally allowed to pick up a street hail(IE the hand), there's plenty of 'livery' car services that if you're willing to schedule they're perfectly willing to come out and pick you up.
Often they're cheaper than the yellow taxis(though remember to negotiate price before the ride!). The Uber hailing system seems perfect for them. It's not, technically, a 'street hail', thus they can respond, avoiding that $1M capital expense in the form of the medallion* entirely.
*costs ~$50k/year, probably as much as the driver himself
How it works is if most people use the train/subway/bus to travel about because they know that if they need to go to some place where the train/bus doesn't go to, a taxi can get them there in reasonable time and cost.
That's a very good observation, even if it's my understanding that a Taxi ride runs 10X as much as one on a train/bus. One can also observe that it can help reduce the perceived need for a personal vehicle because they tend to have huge trunks if somebody goes on a shopping trip and decides 'oops, too much to want to bother with on the subway/bus', or some such. Or the trip to the airport with luggage. It doesn't really matter.
You know, I'm seeing artificial restrictions and make it more expensive restrictions.
If we're going to apply surcharges, how about we put the money towards a system to make NYC even more friendly to alternative transport? The subway system is a good start, but still too limited. It's good at moving relatively massive numbers of people to limited destinations.
Cabs, when they work right, are more or less direct A to B, when A or B might not be near(enough) to a subway station, or there might not be a train going relatively straight enough between the two, or the schedules don't match up, etc... Time is money, remember?
We either need to go old school and like a couple scifi books start putting moving walkways in(so walkers can get twice as far in a given amount of time), or PRT.
One idea I had was to have most/all buildings in the central area hooked up on the 3rd floor(or so) with moving walkways. If you figure that the average walking speed is 3mph and make the walkway operate at 3mph, then figure that an individual traveling will be on one 50% of the time, that's still a 50% increase in distance traveled within whatever distance/time they're willing to walk for.
If you figure that getting a NYC taxi will take an average of 5 minutes to catch/pay and it'll average 20 mph, in a half hour trip: Plain walking: 1.5 miles. Walkway assisted: 2.3 miles Taxi: 6.7 miles(but it costs money)
Like anything, you don't have to get rid of Taxis, but if you reduce edge calls for them, like a 3 mile trip, they'll be happy because longer calls equal more money(on average) while still avoiding high amounts of congestion.
PRT, Personal Rapid Transit, would address the long way more - the idea is extremely light electrified elevated* rail, with off-line stations, that uses individually guided and propelled cars that hold 3-4 people.
The idea is that you get in, specify your destination, and it guides you there using the most direct/fastest route possible. Because it's electronically controlled and on a rail, the cars can be closer together than is safe for humans on pavement. Because it's non-stop, even if the route doesn't take you 'to the door' or has to travel a bit more to get there it's still going to 'tend' to be faster. It's independent of the road system, so it can take pressure off of there.
Bingo. Well, there's actually 3 types of medallions: 1: Standard Medallion. The right to use one of these is rented out to the drivers for their shift. The owner also owns the taxi company - car, servicing facilities, etc... Cost is over $1M at this point to purchase one at auction. It's basically an artificial good created by NYC 2: Owner/Operator Medallion: This is the 'for the small guy!!!' medallion. If I remember right, it's closer to $400k because under most circumstances the owner has to be the operator under this medallion(AND own the car, etc...). It's not allowed to be rented out. Very limited numbers compared to #1. 3: Green Medallion: Instead of driving a crown victorian*, you drive an escape hybrid. As these were the last increase in medallion numbers, the price difference quickly became the difference in price between a Escape and a Crown Vic. Given that it's the renter who pays for the gas, the owner doesn't care. Though I understand once they go 'green' they don't like going back - $4-5/gallon gas in a 30mpg vehicle vs a 10mpg one puts a lot of money in their pocket.
* Then again, cheap 1000W PSU's are only reliably capable of 500W or so anyway. Which actually translates to approx. 150W for the system + 200-250W to the GPU at the peak load + margin.
Then you end up with the consumer protection lawsuit against companies that import '1kw PSUs' that are particularly lying. I don't buy cheap PSUs - I specifically go for the ones that deliver their nameplate capacity within tolerances in independent testing.
A cheap lying PSU is likely to be even LESS efficient.
As for 18 months max - I don't see hexacores being that popular that quickly. 'Most' machines are still business ones, and I'm still seeing mostly dual-core there, with the occasional quad.
I wouldn't say 'badly designed', so much as 'not especially designed to limit power usage when idle'. They actually have to think about the problem, which this is designed to force them to do.
I can see there being issues - you tend to have relatively large amounts of very fast memory on board(can you safely shut it off, or will it continue to consume power?), and high end GPUs are comparable with CPUs for complexity today - how to do you shut parts of that down when not in use?
Mind you, I'd like to get a GPU that uses less juice when I'm not abusing it by playing games, so in the end this might be positive legislation.
Which would be bad while tossing in a hexacore CPU and a kilowatt PSU isn't that hard, it's generally not necessary even with the hottest graphics card on the market today. A lightly loaded kw psu will waste more than a smaller, moderately loaded but well designed supply. A 750W power supply that isn't lying about it's ratings and a quadcore works well for games.
Thus creating the dilemma of making a machine consume MORE power in order to be exempt. Much like how MPG requirements made cars less attractive to consumers and helped spark the SUV craze, because SUVs didn't have the same requirements.
Looking at it, it says that the computer has to meet ALL of the requirements.
My computer is 'high performance'(or at least was), but it's only a quad core and doesn't have a kilowatt PSU.
Which would be bad while tossing in a hexacore CPU and a kilowatt PSU isn't that hard, it's generally not necessary even with the hottest graphics card on the market today. A lightly loaded kw psu will waste more than a smaller, moderately loaded but well designed supply. A 750W power supply that isn't lying about it's ratings and a quadcore works well for games.
Also, the article was complaining that no cards planned today have more than 320 GB/s of frame buffer bandwidth, so therefore outside of two cards/SLI you might not be able to meet that exemption.
Still, I imagine that for the component market it won't be as big of a deal - you could always be putting the card into such a system.
Reading more on the regulations, it looks like such a video card would be considered an 'adder', thus allowing more power to be consumed. But how that would work is beyond me.
The claim that GPUs over a certain bandwith will be banned seems to be absolutely fabricated - it's not something that the regulation's wording or intent or whatever would even hint about.
My reading of it is that GPUs over a certain bandwidth are completely exempted from the regulations. To bring up a car example, it's how a Semi isn't included in car MPG/LP100K regulations, because it's considered 'special duty' or 'high performance'.
For whatever reason, bandwidth was the performance metric the regulators fixated upon, but even with more and more stuff being done within the GPU(such as simulation physics), bandwidth actually isn't an issue at the moment. Perhaps the high end cards are capable of storing so much that once you have all the textures and such loaded, you're sending(and receiving) relatively limited amounts of data, with the vast majority of the work going for the highest 'realism' in the game.
A better metric might be Floating point calcs per second, but even that isn't necessarily a good metric today.
If AMD can't make them fit in the limits, where does that put NVidia? Hate to say it, but for at least the last 3 generations I've studied, NVidia offers the highest performance cards, but ALL of their cards have a performance disadvantage when you look at performance per watt.
$1500 in tickets in NYC is still less than five speeding tickets here in Dallas, not to mention the increases to your insurance premiums.
Which is about the same - it was for 4 tickets, all issued at the same time. The article links to a different cyclist who got about the same amount, but at different times.
I've actually had police wave me through intersections before (different officer, obviously). It's a bit pedantic to quote an article from the alien world of NYC, but otherwise, getting ticketed as a bicyclist is so rare as to almost be non-existent.
I looked it up because it hit fark and I remembered it. Remember, handing out tickets for going 10 over or running a red light isn't news. Getting $1.5k of fines on a bicycle IS. Didn't even really pay attention to where it happened, other than being in the states.
You most certainly CAN get tickets on a bicycle. I had a friend in school who was proud of his bicycle speeding ticket(30 in a 25).
Sadly, I don't bike anymore because the highway IS very much direct to my current work, and there's a lack of non-highway roads. IE it'd be dangerous to try to ride.
Let's see, you quote grill temperature and working area. For our theoretical pizza delivery car, there's not going to be a grill, there's going to be an oven. If the oven isn't at the proper temperature, the pizza won't cook property, so I don't think that's going to be an issue.
As for working area, "what working area"? The pizza would be made at the store as it usually is, then loaded, uncooked, into the oven of the car, from the outside. Well, it might be precooked and the oven more of a 'finisher'. You might need to have it be able to remove the pizza from the actual oven and into a 'keep warm' area if the deliveries take too long. I'm sure actual implementation would get complicated - you have to bake a deep dish for far longer at a lower temperature than a thin crust.
Like I said, the thing would be more like a vending machine - there exist ones that will cook the food you just selected before dispensing it to you. It's not as common in the USA, but I've seen ones that will do cotton candy, hot dogs, hot chocolate, various coffee drinks, TV dinner type trays, soup, even burgers and french fries. Most are just microwave ovens, but certainly not all.
As for parking - it's in motion while cooking, stops and delivers just like ordinary pizza delivery. Well, it's more likely to call your phone 'waiting outside for you to pick up', but such is the cost of progress.
There's been attended versions, though my search for links turned up mostly food trucks that are designed to assemble even as they cook.
I don't see online ordering for things like fresh vegetables - people still want to squeeze the tomatoes and pick the best from the lot. Despite this, most of what comes from a supermarket could be auto-delivered.
There are grocery delivery services already, and they do deliver fresh fruit and vegetables. From what I understand the online groceries have pretty much a 'no questions asked' guarantee, and are very good at delivering high quality produce*, thus people are satisfied. Worst case, remember that most food service establishments have everything delivered, and because they're getting a whole crate of X, it's fresh. The service might divy the crate up, but it's still going to often be fresher than what people see in the store, as they have no need to keep full looking shelves.
Yes, somebody would have to be at home(unless you go schwan style where they'll pack your order into your freezer for you, but then that's a manned service). There's still lots of people who are home during the week, and when I said 'wait until tomorrow', I meant more 'pick a 1-4 hour window tomorrow', where 6-10 pm would be a valid option. Worst case, most are home during the weekend, and I see no reason automated cars can't deliver Saturday/Sunday. Giving at least a day's notice on an order allows them to pull the non-fresh goods early and have them standing by, while optimizing the delivery route for the next day.
*Matter of fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they deliver restaurant grade stuff.
Pardon, I don't live in an area with crazy amounts of regulation about businesses, so 'food truck laws' are mostly the same as 'food establishment laws'.
As for the fire rules - wouldn't the engine/gas tank be bigger? I'm not thinking of just jamming one in there. As for fuel I was thinking mostly electric, though a vehicle completely powered by natural gas might be interesting. Heck, you can even power the thing via gasoline, though that might cost a touch more money.
Worst case a 20# propane tank will provide power to the oven for quite a while - it's a oven, should be mostly sealed.
Ironically, the thing would probably come under vending machine rules more than food service establishment rules.
4. Order online and have the grocery store's automated delivery vehicle bring you your groceries, complete with refridgerator and freezer compartments.
If they're reasonably busy that would allow them to make a stop or five in addition to your delivery while still delivering faster, reducing overall miles traveled per delivery. It gets loads more efficient if you're willing to wait until the next day. Remember, if you send your car it has to go there first, it's your fuel that's being burned, you don't normally have a freezer compartment, the store has to worry about non-standard vehicle sizes/configuration/stuff left in the trunk/other compartments.
This applies to more than just groceries - what about UPS/Fedex, or the pizza delivery truck. How neat would you find a delivery vehicle with a pizza oven inside, so your pizza is finishing baking as it pulls up?
1 death is a tragedy. A thousand deaths is a statistic. People are affected disproportionally by low probability but unusual events than they are by the everyday dangers. Thus fear of flying, where you're safer on average than driving.
I've calced that a self-driving feature could be worth $30k, assuming the thing lasts at least 5 years. And this is a system that's in the top 90% of drivers, no where near 'perfect'. Note this would be a 'total' self driving feature - you give it the destination, perhaps some input on the route, it does the rest.
Note: I always assume when figuring this that the accidents a self-driving car gets into will be different than the ones human driven ones get into. I figure it's not going to get t-boned running a red light(not that good drivers normally do that either), rear-ending somebody from tailgating, etc... It's more likely to get into accidents with unusual road hazards that a human could see coming 'a mile away', while avoiding many accidents the fastest human alive couldn't avoid through sheer reaction speed.
On that topic, I wonder how long it'd take for the law to adjust to the fact that you're not really more of a hazard when drunk in one of these, even with the 'keys' in hand, especially if it's advanced enough that there's [i]no steering wheel[/i]? I wonder at what point they'll stop requiring breathalyzers and start requiring that you simply use a self-driving car with any manual operation controls disabled(or maybe those bits will require you blowing to activate)?
Even if my drive takes a bit longer due to the AI being a 'relaxed' type driver that goes for maximum safety and fuel economy, I figure that being able to read, sleep, watch TV or whatever while doing it will take any sting away.
What I was poorly trying to say with that part is that the number of writes lost as you shrink the process depends on how much you shrink the process, whether it's SLC or MLC, what type of MLC, whether they've figured out any tricks to increase the durability lately, etc... It's not just 20% per 4X increase in density.
Generally speaking, all commercial products have more than enough durability for home or even server use. If I remember right, the 80 year figure is for 'average use', while it's more like 2.5 years if you continuously max out the interface's write speeds.
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That's not a normal situation though - Last couple times I bought, they'd have dropped the price by a couple thousand if I could have paid cash in full.
It was probably more the way the dude's commission was set up, because otherwise I'd take the loan - then pay it off next month. Living in a state that forbids early payment penalties helps.
1. Not going to argue that cornfields have lower diversity
2. Did you miss my point that corn > biofuel = stupid? Though I dropped some words - 'OOM or so better'. 'stiff -> still'
3. Heck, I specified Ethanol as not a good fuel as well.
4. 'Mostly electric cars'
As the AC mentioned, Corn is far from the only potential biofuel. As I mentioned, the only reason it's the primary source here in the USA is the corn lobby. Algae working out or not, I hope they crack the problems with turning cellulose into Ethanol. Heck, I'd prefer if they could turn it into a gasoline analogue that isn't massively hygroscopic like high-purity alcohol.
Bio Fuels of this kind still require enormous effort and land areas to produce.
The whole point of something like this is to utilize waste, which means that we aren't giving up food production or having to cultivate more land in order to make the fuel. I'll agree that corn is stupid, but this is using wine waste - IE grape stuff. Most true environmentalists don't back corn at all, they know how stupid it is. However the corn lobby is powerful and has 'Environmentalists' on it's payroll. Ethanol production from corn has gotten a lot more efficient, but it needs to be an OOM or so, and a plant that can achieve that wouldn't be 'corn' anymore. I'm not convinced of ethanol's suitability as a fuel anyways.
I once saw a documentary about wolves establishing them selves in the area around Chernobyl. The wolves were thriving despite the high radiation levels. Without humans taking up land for agriculture an entire ecosystem established quickly, overcoming a nuclear disaster.
To be fair, 'high radiation levels' are relative. There's actually areas of higher natural radiation that have been occupied by humans for centuries. Radiation is a complex and stiff not fully understood science. Wolves give birth to multiple pups anyways, so as long as the birth defect rate is only a little higher, they can still survive just fine. They're also not living directly in the sarcophagus, unlike some birds. In the birds case though, often they'll lay 4-6 eggs only expecting 1 to survive - a deformed chick just means it's tossed out of the nest by competing chicks faster.
And it makes sense, for the first time all those little animals in the ecosystem had the space and place to live.
Hardly the 'first time', I'd think. They used to have it before humans came, before we developed agriculture, etc...
Where ever we plant corn, pretty much, nothing else can live. Nuclear energy and electric cars are the future. Nuclear energy production takes up very little space, and is by far, less destructive of the environment. Bio Fuels of this kind still require enormous effort and land areas to produce.
Plenty of wildlife can live around corn. Just ask the farmers about turkeys and deer. But I agree; we need something other than corn. Right now my theory is mostly electric cars backed up by biodiesel produced from algae farms in the desert for remaining liquid fuel needs.
Cell Carriers don't make money off the phones though, they make money off the plans.
Well, at least in the USA.
And here I was thinking about an Ap:
"If your phone is stolen our app will report it's location to our servers, at which point we'll send the information to one of our thousands of professional hitmen to kill the thief and retrieve your phone."
I'd respond to the other person who replied, but I don't reply to AC's directly:
'Connect to the phone'? This is a difficulty? It's a cell phone! Regular network contact is a matter of course, and we know that back doors exist for the cell carriers, and they bend over for law enforcement(especially if they have a warrant).
Even a 10% cost increase will result in a much smaller market for it. Modding a PS or XBox back in the day was fairly easy, only required a 'bit' of soldering, yet I can say that 99% of consoles were never modded*. It was a mostly effective level of protection.
Making unlocking a $600 cell phone require a couple hour's work and $100 of parts and such phones will mostly be safe from normal theft.
*Slashdot crowds may differ.
I doubt that happens very much at all, to the point that it'd probably be a major news item if it happens.
Why?
1. IMEI numbers are currently hard to guess. They're not simple
2. No gain on the part of a seller to block a phone they just sold - indeed, odds are that the buyer can track them down to demand a refund for a *STOLEN PHONE*
3. It takes work; Most people aren't that nasty
4. If they can get that close to the phone, they might as well steal it
5. Most people wouldn't think to do it. Even divorcing couples.
Especially your specifying 'second-hand' phones. Unless it's stolen I doubt the seller is going to care; wish you luck with your new(to you) phone.
Most intelligent city residents bother to keep the number of a good car service... I can remember "four ones" from growing up there, I'm sure similar companies exist nowadays.
That reminds me - while medallion taxis are the only ones legally allowed to pick up a street hail(IE the hand), there's plenty of 'livery' car services that if you're willing to schedule they're perfectly willing to come out and pick you up.
Often they're cheaper than the yellow taxis(though remember to negotiate price before the ride!). The Uber hailing system seems perfect for them. It's not, technically, a 'street hail', thus they can respond, avoiding that $1M capital expense in the form of the medallion* entirely.
*costs ~$50k/year, probably as much as the driver himself
How it works is if most people use the train/subway/bus to travel about because they know that if they need to go to some place where the train/bus doesn't go to, a taxi can get them there in reasonable time and cost.
That's a very good observation, even if it's my understanding that a Taxi ride runs 10X as much as one on a train/bus. One can also observe that it can help reduce the perceived need for a personal vehicle because they tend to have huge trunks if somebody goes on a shopping trip and decides 'oops, too much to want to bother with on the subway/bus', or some such. Or the trip to the airport with luggage. It doesn't really matter.
You know, I'm seeing artificial restrictions and make it more expensive restrictions.
If we're going to apply surcharges, how about we put the money towards a system to make NYC even more friendly to alternative transport? The subway system is a good start, but still too limited. It's good at moving relatively massive numbers of people to limited destinations.
Cabs, when they work right, are more or less direct A to B, when A or B might not be near(enough) to a subway station, or there might not be a train going relatively straight enough between the two, or the schedules don't match up, etc... Time is money, remember?
We either need to go old school and like a couple scifi books start putting moving walkways in(so walkers can get twice as far in a given amount of time), or PRT.
One idea I had was to have most/all buildings in the central area hooked up on the 3rd floor(or so) with moving walkways. If you figure that the average walking speed is 3mph and make the walkway operate at 3mph, then figure that an individual traveling will be on one 50% of the time, that's still a 50% increase in distance traveled within whatever distance/time they're willing to walk for.
If you figure that getting a NYC taxi will take an average of 5 minutes to catch/pay and it'll average 20 mph, in a half hour trip:
Plain walking: 1.5 miles.
Walkway assisted: 2.3 miles
Taxi: 6.7 miles(but it costs money)
Like anything, you don't have to get rid of Taxis, but if you reduce edge calls for them, like a 3 mile trip, they'll be happy because longer calls equal more money(on average) while still avoiding high amounts of congestion.
PRT, Personal Rapid Transit, would address the long way more - the idea is extremely light electrified elevated* rail, with off-line stations, that uses individually guided and propelled cars that hold 3-4 people.
The idea is that you get in, specify your destination, and it guides you there using the most direct/fastest route possible. Because it's electronically controlled and on a rail, the cars can be closer together than is safe for humans on pavement. Because it's non-stop, even if the route doesn't take you 'to the door' or has to travel a bit more to get there it's still going to 'tend' to be faster. It's independent of the road system, so it can take pressure off of there.
*Well it can also be ground level or even buried.
Bingo. Well, there's actually 3 types of medallions:
1: Standard Medallion. The right to use one of these is rented out to the drivers for their shift. The owner also owns the taxi company - car, servicing facilities, etc... Cost is over $1M at this point to purchase one at auction. It's basically an artificial good created by NYC
2: Owner/Operator Medallion: This is the 'for the small guy!!!' medallion. If I remember right, it's closer to $400k because under most circumstances the owner has to be the operator under this medallion(AND own the car, etc...). It's not allowed to be rented out. Very limited numbers compared to #1.
3: Green Medallion: Instead of driving a crown victorian*, you drive an escape hybrid. As these were the last increase in medallion numbers, the price difference quickly became the difference in price between a Escape and a Crown Vic. Given that it's the renter who pays for the gas, the owner doesn't care. Though I understand once they go 'green' they don't like going back - $4-5/gallon gas in a 30mpg vehicle vs a 10mpg one puts a lot of money in their pocket.
*Might of changed recently, don't know.
* Then again, cheap 1000W PSU's are only reliably capable of 500W or so anyway. Which actually translates to approx. 150W for the system + 200-250W to the GPU at the peak load + margin.
Then you end up with the consumer protection lawsuit against companies that import '1kw PSUs' that are particularly lying. I don't buy cheap PSUs - I specifically go for the ones that deliver their nameplate capacity within tolerances in independent testing.
A cheap lying PSU is likely to be even LESS efficient.
As for 18 months max - I don't see hexacores being that popular that quickly. 'Most' machines are still business ones, and I'm still seeing mostly dual-core there, with the occasional quad.
I wouldn't say 'badly designed', so much as 'not especially designed to limit power usage when idle'. They actually have to think about the problem, which this is designed to force them to do.
I can see there being issues - you tend to have relatively large amounts of very fast memory on board(can you safely shut it off, or will it continue to consume power?), and high end GPUs are comparable with CPUs for complexity today - how to do you shut parts of that down when not in use?
Mind you, I'd like to get a GPU that uses less juice when I'm not abusing it by playing games, so in the end this might be positive legislation.
Which would be bad while tossing in a hexacore CPU and a kilowatt PSU isn't that hard, it's generally not necessary even with the hottest graphics card on the market today. A lightly loaded kw psu will waste more than a smaller, moderately loaded but well designed supply. A 750W power supply that isn't lying about it's ratings and a quadcore works well for games.
Thus creating the dilemma of making a machine consume MORE power in order to be exempt. Much like how MPG requirements made cars less attractive to consumers and helped spark the SUV craze, because SUVs didn't have the same requirements.
Looking at it, it says that the computer has to meet ALL of the requirements.
My computer is 'high performance'(or at least was), but it's only a quad core and doesn't have a kilowatt PSU.
Which would be bad while tossing in a hexacore CPU and a kilowatt PSU isn't that hard, it's generally not necessary even with the hottest graphics card on the market today. A lightly loaded kw psu will waste more than a smaller, moderately loaded but well designed supply. A 750W power supply that isn't lying about it's ratings and a quadcore works well for games.
Also, the article was complaining that no cards planned today have more than 320 GB/s of frame buffer bandwidth, so therefore outside of two cards/SLI you might not be able to meet that exemption.
Still, I imagine that for the component market it won't be as big of a deal - you could always be putting the card into such a system.
Reading more on the regulations, it looks like such a video card would be considered an 'adder', thus allowing more power to be consumed. But how that would work is beyond me.
The claim that GPUs over a certain bandwith will be banned seems to be absolutely fabricated - it's not something that the regulation's wording or intent or whatever would even hint about.
My reading of it is that GPUs over a certain bandwidth are completely exempted from the regulations. To bring up a car example, it's how a Semi isn't included in car MPG/LP100K regulations, because it's considered 'special duty' or 'high performance'.
For whatever reason, bandwidth was the performance metric the regulators fixated upon, but even with more and more stuff being done within the GPU(such as simulation physics), bandwidth actually isn't an issue at the moment. Perhaps the high end cards are capable of storing so much that once you have all the textures and such loaded, you're sending(and receiving) relatively limited amounts of data, with the vast majority of the work going for the highest 'realism' in the game.
A better metric might be Floating point calcs per second, but even that isn't necessarily a good metric today.
If AMD can't make them fit in the limits, where does that put NVidia? Hate to say it, but for at least the last 3 generations I've studied, NVidia offers the highest performance cards, but ALL of their cards have a performance disadvantage when you look at performance per watt.
$1500 in tickets in NYC is still less than five speeding tickets here in Dallas, not to mention the increases to your insurance premiums.
Which is about the same - it was for 4 tickets, all issued at the same time. The article links to a different cyclist who got about the same amount, but at different times.
I've actually had police wave me through intersections before (different officer, obviously). It's a bit pedantic to quote an article from the alien world of NYC, but otherwise, getting ticketed as a bicyclist is so rare as to almost be non-existent.
I looked it up because it hit fark and I remembered it. Remember, handing out tickets for going 10 over or running a red light isn't news. Getting $1.5k of fines on a bicycle IS. Didn't even really pay attention to where it happened, other than being in the states.
ou can't get speeding/school zone speeding/stop sign/red light tickets on a bike
Might want to reconsider that part.
You most certainly CAN get tickets on a bicycle. I had a friend in school who was proud of his bicycle speeding ticket(30 in a 25).
Sadly, I don't bike anymore because the highway IS very much direct to my current work, and there's a lack of non-highway roads. IE it'd be dangerous to try to ride.
Let's see, you quote grill temperature and working area. For our theoretical pizza delivery car, there's not going to be a grill, there's going to be an oven. If the oven isn't at the proper temperature, the pizza won't cook property, so I don't think that's going to be an issue.
As for working area, "what working area"? The pizza would be made at the store as it usually is, then loaded, uncooked, into the oven of the car, from the outside. Well, it might be precooked and the oven more of a 'finisher'. You might need to have it be able to remove the pizza from the actual oven and into a 'keep warm' area if the deliveries take too long. I'm sure actual implementation would get complicated - you have to bake a deep dish for far longer at a lower temperature than a thin crust.
Like I said, the thing would be more like a vending machine - there exist ones that will cook the food you just selected before dispensing it to you. It's not as common in the USA, but I've seen ones that will do cotton candy, hot dogs, hot chocolate, various coffee drinks, TV dinner type trays, soup, even burgers and french fries. Most are just microwave ovens, but certainly not all.
As for parking - it's in motion while cooking, stops and delivers just like ordinary pizza delivery. Well, it's more likely to call your phone 'waiting outside for you to pick up', but such is the cost of progress.
There's been attended versions, though my search for links turned up mostly food trucks that are designed to assemble even as they cook.
I don't see online ordering for things like fresh vegetables - people still want to squeeze the tomatoes and pick the best from the lot. Despite this, most of what comes from a supermarket could be auto-delivered.
There are grocery delivery services already, and they do deliver fresh fruit and vegetables. From what I understand the online groceries have pretty much a 'no questions asked' guarantee, and are very good at delivering high quality produce*, thus people are satisfied. Worst case, remember that most food service establishments have everything delivered, and because they're getting a whole crate of X, it's fresh. The service might divy the crate up, but it's still going to often be fresher than what people see in the store, as they have no need to keep full looking shelves.
Yes, somebody would have to be at home(unless you go schwan style where they'll pack your order into your freezer for you, but then that's a manned service). There's still lots of people who are home during the week, and when I said 'wait until tomorrow', I meant more 'pick a 1-4 hour window tomorrow', where 6-10 pm would be a valid option. Worst case, most are home during the weekend, and I see no reason automated cars can't deliver Saturday/Sunday. Giving at least a day's notice on an order allows them to pull the non-fresh goods early and have them standing by, while optimizing the delivery route for the next day.
*Matter of fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they deliver restaurant grade stuff.
Pardon, I don't live in an area with crazy amounts of regulation about businesses, so 'food truck laws' are mostly the same as 'food establishment laws'.
As for the fire rules - wouldn't the engine/gas tank be bigger? I'm not thinking of just jamming one in there. As for fuel I was thinking mostly electric, though a vehicle completely powered by natural gas might be interesting. Heck, you can even power the thing via gasoline, though that might cost a touch more money.
Worst case a 20# propane tank will provide power to the oven for quite a while - it's a oven, should be mostly sealed.
Ironically, the thing would probably come under vending machine rules more than food service establishment rules.
4. Order online and have the grocery store's automated delivery vehicle bring you your groceries, complete with refridgerator and freezer compartments.
If they're reasonably busy that would allow them to make a stop or five in addition to your delivery while still delivering faster, reducing overall miles traveled per delivery. It gets loads more efficient if you're willing to wait until the next day. Remember, if you send your car it has to go there first, it's your fuel that's being burned, you don't normally have a freezer compartment, the store has to worry about non-standard vehicle sizes/configuration/stuff left in the trunk/other compartments.
This applies to more than just groceries - what about UPS/Fedex, or the pizza delivery truck. How neat would you find a delivery vehicle with a pizza oven inside, so your pizza is finishing baking as it pulls up?
1 death is a tragedy. A thousand deaths is a statistic. People are affected disproportionally by low probability but unusual events than they are by the everyday dangers. Thus fear of flying, where you're safer on average than driving.
I've calced that a self-driving feature could be worth $30k, assuming the thing lasts at least 5 years. And this is a system that's in the top 90% of drivers, no where near 'perfect'. Note this would be a 'total' self driving feature - you give it the destination, perhaps some input on the route, it does the rest.
Note: I always assume when figuring this that the accidents a self-driving car gets into will be different than the ones human driven ones get into. I figure it's not going to get t-boned running a red light(not that good drivers normally do that either), rear-ending somebody from tailgating, etc... It's more likely to get into accidents with unusual road hazards that a human could see coming 'a mile away', while avoiding many accidents the fastest human alive couldn't avoid through sheer reaction speed.
On that topic, I wonder how long it'd take for the law to adjust to the fact that you're not really more of a hazard when drunk in one of these, even with the 'keys' in hand, especially if it's advanced enough that there's [i]no steering wheel[/i]? I wonder at what point they'll stop requiring breathalyzers and start requiring that you simply use a self-driving car with any manual operation controls disabled(or maybe those bits will require you blowing to activate)?
Even if my drive takes a bit longer due to the AI being a 'relaxed' type driver that goes for maximum safety and fuel economy, I figure that being able to read, sleep, watch TV or whatever while doing it will take any sting away.
What I was poorly trying to say with that part is that the number of writes lost as you shrink the process depends on how much you shrink the process, whether it's SLC or MLC, what type of MLC, whether they've figured out any tricks to increase the durability lately, etc... It's not just 20% per 4X increase in density.
Generally speaking, all commercial products have more than enough durability for home or even server use. If I remember right, the 80 year figure is for 'average use', while it's more like 2.5 years if you continuously max out the interface's write speeds.