My answer to that is that offroading is a minority thing for both SUVs and Trucks. Many drive trucks for the towing or cargo capacity, not for off-roading.
On the truck side, if you put a Model-S engine system in, you have plenty of power. One or two of their 'skateboard' power packs. Maybe even make it a hybrid - put a engine-generator in it to help keep the battery topped off.
I seem to recall that there was a bit of an ado about both it and, in particular, a bit of a row that needed licensing specifically about knobs and some markings on the recreations?
All I remember was that the widow of John DeLorean sued for trademark/copyright violations, and settled for an undisclosed amount.
Oddly enough, I'm currently in an AI class and brought up Go just yesterday... The improved algorithm and neural net is one thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if they still tossed more computing power at it than Deep Blue.
Well, part of it was my memories from 10-20 years ago, some then put a new engine in. But yeah, note that I said there's upgrades that boost the stock engine - meaning the stock engine is still there, just upgraded from 130 hp to 200.
Your changes, which would require new pistons and cams, and a replacement exhaust (the upgrade list I saw replaced the whole exhaust system with a slightly bigger one).
Huh, when I did the research I found that the new DMC company had the ability to make all parts if necessary, though for a lot they still had lots of original parts they could use for most of it.
Then again, they might of ended up recreating some tooling, or even using more modern production methods.
Okay, I mis-remembered. To put it simply: Due to fuel requirements and such, it ended up with, as you say, an anemic engine for a vehicle that was supposed to be 'sporty'. I remember reading that DMC had wanted to have an engine upgrade option - I just mis-remembered that it was a v-6 stock, which would have made the most likely upgrade a v-8. That being said, even back then a bigger v-6 would probably have been a valid option, and I do know that a number of owners did put an upgraded engine into the vehicle.
Rereading, it seems there's upgrades out there that boost the stock 130HP engine to 200HP, which should be enough for most anybody.
In a reasonably climate controlled warehouse they'd still be in 'like new' condition. If not, the company that bought DMC's rights and became DMC has the molds to make new ones.
As long as they keep the production numbers low enough - a few hundred cars a year, they're exempted. Doesn't mean the car is safe.
It's just that below a certain number they're considered 'custom' cars that there's not enough production to justify the full up testing that might destroy half of them. I think the current test set ends up being about 12 cars if you do everything - and it's not like they can do a rear-end crash test on a car that was previously tested in a front end collision, because the stresses from the front end have probably been transmitted to the rear, spoiling actual results.
Same deal with supercars. Doesn't mean they're safe or unsafe, just untested.
From what I understand, the courts get pissed about this and have started to break through such 'protections' if it's obvious that the company was set up simply to 'shelter' the parent company from judgements against them.
Now what would have been a real reveal is if they'd actually found aliens or their equipment and had it in Area 51.
A different theory is that they've been using Area 51 for years as a false flag operation to keep people from finding the real site the extra-terrestrials and such are being kept at.
The alternative is to do away with fines as they are in essence "uncollectible." Or raise the traffic tickets from $15 to $1000 to make them worthwhile to collect.
What do you do when you encounter somebody that has $20 but not $1k? Toss them in jail, crediting them $100/day, while spending ~$100/day in expenses to keep them in jail?
Doesn't take many of them to exceed the money gotten from those who actually have it.
One thing I noted from the description was that the 25% goes to Vigilant, pure profit for them. But if the person can't pay, it's arrest and probably jail, bail, and all that - which is a public cost. I'm sure vigilant isn't seeing any of those costs.
Not that I like the idea of people not paying their fines and judgements, but it's my understanding that in many cases they can't pay, not that they don't want to. In some cases they don't even know.
Given the disparity between fees and jail, I wouldn't be surprised if the county ends up seeing this system cost more in jail and processing expenses than it gains in fines being paid.
It's based on a network of high precision ground receivers which are used to calculate two sets of correction information.
It sounds similar enough to what Obfuscant posted to be the same system. In either case, the high precision ground station is used to increase the accuracy by correcting various errors. He just simplified it more.
Though looking it up - Ephemeris is 30 seconds per satellite, Almanac takes a bit longer.
There's probably less than 100,000 people that the US government gives enough of a crap about to keep material on them. The rest of us can be dealt with as needed without all this effort.
That's actually part of the NSA's problem. All this effort into collecting ALL the information, and they don't have enough resources left over to properly analyze the stuff they actually care about.
If we're talking about an actual database, I see a few issues with your metric. First, data alignment - due to the way modern computers are designed, it's probably cheaper/faster to pad out things like 5 byte values to 8 bytes. In addition, this would better allow for capturing country code - their interest in all phone calls is one thing, but I'd estimate that they're at least an order of magnitude more interested in international calls.
By the same token, I'd have start time be 64 bits. This gives them the ability to have sub-second accuracy as well as using standard time protocols. Having an end time rather than duration gives you another 64 bits. Plus, while 16 bits is 'enough' for an 18 hour phone call with 1 second accuracy(unsigned, of course), I know of phone calls longer.
That gives me 32 bytes per call, with all fields aligned at 8 byte increments, which should speed up access times considerably. Yes, it could be compressed. About 500 TB.
Still, the idea that the database is somewhere between 200 and 1000 TB doesn't seem to be that far off. As clodney said - they could be storing more information than just what he said. What if they're also recording the subscriber numbers, which is the number used to represent the actual physical line, not the phone number assigned at the time? What about tower information? Etc...
From what I've heard about taxi drivers there, desperate immigrants.
As for 'chock full', it depends on when and where you are - most of the 'taxis' are probably actually 'black cars', IE 'livery', which are rented more like limos rather than hailed. It's actually illegal for a black car to respond to a street hail - and the cops run stings occasionally.
You want crazy? Most companies won't sell below a $100k/$300k policy, but my state requires even less: State of Alaska requirements: $50k/$100k/$25k - per person, per incident Yes, I buy 'underinsured' insurance. What this means is that if I get hurt by a motorist with less insurance than me, my insurance picks up the difference to their limit. So I get hit by somebody with a $50k policy, my insurance picks up the next $200k because I have a $250k policy per person. Florida is downright insane: $10k personal injury and $10k property damage. California: $15k/$30K/$5k A collected list of all states, though since it's not from the states themselves, may not be accurate.
As for Germany, you guys must of really cranked up the levels since I was there. I find your German insurance levels crazy, but in a better way - of course, the last dollar(or Euro) of insurance are cheaper than the first, so those levels aren't as expensive.
Still, from what I can find German limits are a bit less than you said - 2.5M/7.5M/500k Euros
It took a court to break the company's argument that since it's drivers were independent contractors, the company itself shouldn't be found liable.
Indeed, I think there's a misconception on what liability coverage is, and how liability insurance works.
You see, any liability insurance police is limited by a maximum payout - For example, a common one is $100k per person, $300k per incident coverage, my 'step up' from that which is $250k per person/$500k per incident. This is generally enough to cover most claims. But liability itself doesn't have a limit unless a statute(law) has been passed limiting it.
So the taxi driver gets into an accident and causes $8M of damage. Must of been nasty. But he's carrying the minimum insurance. $100k is paid to the harmed individual via the insurance. Obviously this is 'no where near enough'. So the harmed party would go after the rest of the cab driver's assets. Problem: Most people in the USA are effectively 'judgement proof' because their debts exceed their assets, and as a matter of law, their home, primary vehicle, and such are generally untouchable*. Most cab driver's aren't rich enough to have a spare yacht that can be sold. So lawyer and court fees would quickly drive the driver bankrupt. You can't get money from a stone.
So in this case they then go after the parent company - Yellow Cab. It does it's best to argue that it's not liable. Hell, it doesn't have insurance for this. Thus, when the verdict is handed down, they're 'forced' to file for bankruptcy, if one of the more minor versions of it.
When people mention 'liability coverage', they generally mean insurance, which this isn't. This is straight up liability.
*They can force the sale of extra vehicles, if not used for work. But for something like a primary residence, if the judge determines that selling the residence/vehicle and buying a more modest version won't actually yield a significant amount of money, they won't do so. Figure on losing 20-40% of the value of the property in question, and suddenly while there might be 'modest' gains to be had, kicking a taxi driver out of a $200k lousy home and forcing him into an apartment would actually COST money. You're not getting much selling a $10k car to the dealer only to buy an $8k car.
The quarter of a million price on a medallion smells like a price that opens up for corruption.
You think this is bad? NYC medallions are routinely valued at around $1M each.
And no, ShanghaiBill, the average driver doesn't own their own medallion, at least in NYC. That's owned by a conglomerate and the driver has to rent the taxi, medallion, and everything else from that company.
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My answer to that is that offroading is a minority thing for both SUVs and Trucks. Many drive trucks for the towing or cargo capacity, not for off-roading.
On the truck side, if you put a Model-S engine system in, you have plenty of power. One or two of their 'skateboard' power packs. Maybe even make it a hybrid - put a engine-generator in it to help keep the battery topped off.
That could be one hell of a towing truck.
I seem to recall that there was a bit of an ado about both it and, in particular, a bit of a row that needed licensing specifically about knobs and some markings on the recreations?
All I remember was that the widow of John DeLorean sued for trademark/copyright violations, and settled for an undisclosed amount.
Chess is brute forced; this is not.
Oddly enough, I'm currently in an AI class and brought up Go just yesterday... The improved algorithm and neural net is one thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if they still tossed more computing power at it than Deep Blue.
No need for any engine swap, just fix the PRV V6
Well, part of it was my memories from 10-20 years ago, some then put a new engine in. But yeah, note that I said there's upgrades that boost the stock engine - meaning the stock engine is still there, just upgraded from 130 hp to 200.
Your changes, which would require new pistons and cams, and a replacement exhaust (the upgrade list I saw replaced the whole exhaust system with a slightly bigger one).
Huh, when I did the research I found that the new DMC company had the ability to make all parts if necessary, though for a lot they still had lots of original parts they could use for most of it.
Then again, they might of ended up recreating some tooling, or even using more modern production methods.
It's stainless sheet metal, and you are correct - no need for paint.
Okay, I mis-remembered. To put it simply: Due to fuel requirements and such, it ended up with, as you say, an anemic engine for a vehicle that was supposed to be 'sporty'. I remember reading that DMC had wanted to have an engine upgrade option - I just mis-remembered that it was a v-6 stock, which would have made the most likely upgrade a v-8. That being said, even back then a bigger v-6 would probably have been a valid option, and I do know that a number of owners did put an upgraded engine into the vehicle.
Rereading, it seems there's upgrades out there that boost the stock 130HP engine to 200HP, which should be enough for most anybody.
In a reasonably climate controlled warehouse they'd still be in 'like new' condition. If not, the company that bought DMC's rights and became DMC has the molds to make new ones.
As long as they keep the production numbers low enough - a few hundred cars a year, they're exempted. Doesn't mean the car is safe.
It's just that below a certain number they're considered 'custom' cars that there's not enough production to justify the full up testing that might destroy half of them. I think the current test set ends up being about 12 cars if you do everything - and it's not like they can do a rear-end crash test on a car that was previously tested in a front end collision, because the stresses from the front end have probably been transmitted to the rear, spoiling actual results.
Same deal with supercars. Doesn't mean they're safe or unsafe, just untested.
You don't have to worry about mileage because as soon as you drive one you'll understand why DMC went out of business.
One of the common mods is to replace the 4 cylinder with the 6 cylinder that DMC had wanted as an option for the car.
Not much plastic in a Delorean - the body of the car is sheet metal, unlike a lot of modern cars.
From what I understand, the courts get pissed about this and have started to break through such 'protections' if it's obvious that the company was set up simply to 'shelter' the parent company from judgements against them.
Now what would have been a real reveal is if they'd actually found aliens or their equipment and had it in Area 51.
A different theory is that they've been using Area 51 for years as a false flag operation to keep people from finding the real site the extra-terrestrials and such are being kept at.
The alternative is to do away with fines as they are in essence "uncollectible." Or raise the traffic tickets from $15 to $1000 to make them worthwhile to collect.
What do you do when you encounter somebody that has $20 but not $1k? Toss them in jail, crediting them $100/day, while spending ~$100/day in expenses to keep them in jail?
Doesn't take many of them to exceed the money gotten from those who actually have it.
One thing I noted from the description was that the 25% goes to Vigilant, pure profit for them. But if the person can't pay, it's arrest and probably jail, bail, and all that - which is a public cost. I'm sure vigilant isn't seeing any of those costs.
Not that I like the idea of people not paying their fines and judgements, but it's my understanding that in many cases they can't pay, not that they don't want to. In some cases they don't even know.
Given the disparity between fees and jail, I wouldn't be surprised if the county ends up seeing this system cost more in jail and processing expenses than it gains in fines being paid.
It's based on a network of high precision ground receivers which are used to calculate two sets of correction information.
It sounds similar enough to what Obfuscant posted to be the same system. In either case, the high precision ground station is used to increase the accuracy by correcting various errors. He just simplified it more.
Though looking it up - Ephemeris is 30 seconds per satellite, Almanac takes a bit longer.
There's probably less than 100,000 people that the US government gives enough of a crap about to keep material on them. The rest of us can be dealt with as needed without all this effort.
That's actually part of the NSA's problem. All this effort into collecting ALL the information, and they don't have enough resources left over to properly analyze the stuff they actually care about.
If we're talking about an actual database, I see a few issues with your metric.
First, data alignment - due to the way modern computers are designed, it's probably cheaper/faster to pad out things like 5 byte values to 8 bytes. In addition, this would better allow for capturing country code - their interest in all phone calls is one thing, but I'd estimate that they're at least an order of magnitude more interested in international calls.
By the same token, I'd have start time be 64 bits. This gives them the ability to have sub-second accuracy as well as using standard time protocols. Having an end time rather than duration gives you another 64 bits. Plus, while 16 bits is 'enough' for an 18 hour phone call with 1 second accuracy(unsigned, of course), I know of phone calls longer.
That gives me 32 bytes per call, with all fields aligned at 8 byte increments, which should speed up access times considerably. Yes, it could be compressed. About 500 TB.
Still, the idea that the database is somewhere between 200 and 1000 TB doesn't seem to be that far off. As clodney said - they could be storing more information than just what he said. What if they're also recording the subscriber numbers, which is the number used to represent the actual physical line, not the phone number assigned at the time? What about tower information? Etc...
From what I've heard about taxi drivers there, desperate immigrants.
As for 'chock full', it depends on when and where you are - most of the 'taxis' are probably actually 'black cars', IE 'livery', which are rented more like limos rather than hailed. It's actually illegal for a black car to respond to a street hail - and the cops run stings occasionally.
You want crazy? Most companies won't sell below a $100k/$300k policy, but my state requires even less:
State of Alaska requirements: $50k/$100k/$25k - per person, per incident
Yes, I buy 'underinsured' insurance. What this means is that if I get hurt by a motorist with less insurance than me, my insurance picks up the difference to their limit. So I get hit by somebody with a $50k policy, my insurance picks up the next $200k because I have a $250k policy per person.
Florida is downright insane: $10k personal injury and $10k property damage.
California: $15k/$30K/$5k
A collected list of all states, though since it's not from the states themselves, may not be accurate.
As for Germany, you guys must of really cranked up the levels since I was there.
I find your German insurance levels crazy, but in a better way - of course, the last dollar(or Euro) of insurance are cheaper than the first, so those levels aren't as expensive.
Still, from what I can find German limits are a bit less than you said - 2.5M/7.5M/500k Euros
But the long distance transmission losses and wheeling charges will kill you.
It could easily be done with some sets of HVDC lines, much less superconducting ones. Would cost too much to install though.
Were you trying to use CFLs for growing things? I don't imagine that that worked all that well. They really need to be designed for that purpose.
It took a court to break the company's argument that since it's drivers were independent contractors, the company itself shouldn't be found liable.
Indeed, I think there's a misconception on what liability coverage is, and how liability insurance works.
You see, any liability insurance police is limited by a maximum payout - For example, a common one is $100k per person, $300k per incident coverage, my 'step up' from that which is $250k per person/$500k per incident. This is generally enough to cover most claims. But liability itself doesn't have a limit unless a statute(law) has been passed limiting it.
So the taxi driver gets into an accident and causes $8M of damage. Must of been nasty. But he's carrying the minimum insurance. $100k is paid to the harmed individual via the insurance. Obviously this is 'no where near enough'. So the harmed party would go after the rest of the cab driver's assets. Problem: Most people in the USA are effectively 'judgement proof' because their debts exceed their assets, and as a matter of law, their home, primary vehicle, and such are generally untouchable*. Most cab driver's aren't rich enough to have a spare yacht that can be sold. So lawyer and court fees would quickly drive the driver bankrupt. You can't get money from a stone.
So in this case they then go after the parent company - Yellow Cab. It does it's best to argue that it's not liable. Hell, it doesn't have insurance for this. Thus, when the verdict is handed down, they're 'forced' to file for bankruptcy, if one of the more minor versions of it.
When people mention 'liability coverage', they generally mean insurance, which this isn't. This is straight up liability.
*They can force the sale of extra vehicles, if not used for work. But for something like a primary residence, if the judge determines that selling the residence/vehicle and buying a more modest version won't actually yield a significant amount of money, they won't do so. Figure on losing 20-40% of the value of the property in question, and suddenly while there might be 'modest' gains to be had, kicking a taxi driver out of a $200k lousy home and forcing him into an apartment would actually COST money. You're not getting much selling a $10k car to the dealer only to buy an $8k car.
Creditors, hold off a sec, lets see if we can make this work our so we can still pay you pennies on the dollar and not actually go bankrupt."
That's more chapter 13.
The quarter of a million price on a medallion smells like a price that opens up for corruption.
You think this is bad? NYC medallions are routinely valued at around $1M each.
And no, ShanghaiBill, the average driver doesn't own their own medallion, at least in NYC. That's owned by a conglomerate and the driver has to rent the taxi, medallion, and everything else from that company.