The same argument can be made about the death penalty. As the US justice system has shown repeatedly there are quite a lot of innocent people on death row.
Now the question becomes: Do you rather want to abolish the death penalty so that no innocent people are killed - or do you want to make sure that criminals are killed and accept the innocent victimes as collateral damage?
Benjamin Franklin stated: "It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer". I find it interesting that the US have moved into the completely opposite direction.
Riiight. Because US sex offenders lists contain people who made the mistake of drunkenly pissing against a wall in public... As long as you have those laws, your country doesn't get to be upset about anything regarding people who want to be forgotten.
Not to mention that US laws actually allows the prosecution of minors when their nude shot of themselves gets into the public internet. Because they created child pornography, or so the dubious logic goes.
Klasse B:
Kraftfahrzeuge – ausgenommen Kraftfahrzeuge der Klassen AM, A1, A2 und A – mit einer zulässigen Gesamtmasse von nicht mehr als 3 500 kg, die zur Beförderung von nicht mehr als acht Personen außer dem Fahrzeugführer ausgelegt und gebaut sind (auch mit Anhänger mit einer zulässigen Gesamtmasse von nicht mehr als 750 kg oder mit Anhänger über 750 kg zulässiger Gesamtmasse, sofern 3 500 kg zulässige Gesamtmasse der Kombination nicht überschritten wird).
If they state that they're using their car for private needs and then go on to use it in a business setting - certainly.
Over here, you insure the car instead of the driver and you also have to tell the insurance company what you're using the car for. Lying to insurance companies was always a bad idea, y'know?
Riiight. You're forgetting one thing: The insurance companies.
As soon as you have been in an accident while driving for Uber, your insurance company WILL drop your contract AND sue you - because the standard insurance contract is not intended for transportation services.
It's a grey area and the companies you link already have had some problems. However, the companies themselves already link the limits on their sites themselves:
No cars with more than 9 seats
No profit making - the money you collect may not exceed the costs you incur for gas and car usage (deprecation)
No regular routes
No drivers who make this kind of driving their job.
The linked article lacks one important detail: The fine of up to 250,000€ is for each instance of breaking the injunction.
Sure, the first violation may only cost 2,000€. But that will go up for every violation. And you can bet your ass that the competitors will use the apps to check on Uber. And they will report any violation they find.
You're wrong there. The VW Up exists as both a pure electric and pure gasoline version. The difference in price? 10,000€
That's the price for the battery. In the case of the Up it almost doubles the price (from 12,000€ to 22,000€). And "all the other bits" being expensive? Seriously?
With the switch to pure electric you just god rid of the following: The alternator which provides the energy for all the gizmos in a normal gasoline car. And, more importantly, the transmission, one of the most complicated and intricate mechanical pieces in a car with a combustion engine.
Two complicated parts of the car, just poof! gone like that. The engine itself also just became way more easy - you don't need carefully timed pistons. You don't need the 3-way catalysator and the lambda probe. And so on and so forth. Hell, if you wanted to you could let each of the 4 wheels be driven by a separate motor! (which gets rid of the need for a differential!).
"Complex / insane" and "aerodynamic" usually don't mix very well. Not to mention that there's the usability factor - you may get an insanely low cv from a teardrop shape. Doesn't mean that it's usable.
Yes. But they're not cheap and the production process is quite involved. And he specifically drew a relation between material used and possible aerodynamics:
[...]Replacing metals with ultralight, ultrastrong materials like carbon-fiber composites can provide safer, lighter and more aerodynamic vehicles that consume severalfold less energy and could be simpler to produce with 80% less capital.[...]
From:"Reinventing Fire: Three Energy Gamechangers for China and the World, Nov. 15th, 2013, pg. 2
He specifically mentioned "more aerodynamic" in addition to "lighter". I'm also not that convinced of "ultrastrong" materials being safer due to the fact that you want a crumple zone to soak up kinetic energy.
Not to mention that "severalfold less energy" is a lie: The BMW i3 already largely consists of carbon-fiber and is not that much lighter and, if you calculate the average energy consumption, doesn't consume that much less energy.
Lastly, carbon-fiber is not more "simpler to produce". Folding, bending and melting metals is easy compared to what you have to go through for carbon-fiber. Not to mention that it's not recycleable. Metal is easy to recycle.
Well, that's the problem with most renewable energy creators: They're dependent on an external factor. So, keeping some in "reserve" might not exactly yield the result you want. What use are additional windmills is there's no wind? What use are solar panels if it's nighttime or overcast?
Yes, there are others like biogas or waterpower, but most of those would fall under this heading of "energy storage" which this guy proposes to be superfluous. If they aren't storage technologies, they're usually not scalable enough, either due to provisioning problems (biogas) or geographical restrictions (water).
I did read some parts of it. For instance, he proposed that switching to carbon-fiber instead of metals that we would be able to create more aerodynamic shapes. Which is rubbish, of course, the shape of a car is not dependent on the material used.
He also proposed that switching to carbon-fiber would reduce costs. Far from it: Production of carbon-fiber is a very expensive process due to the way the shapes are formed. One of the reasons, by the way, why the BMW i3 is quite expensive.
There were a whole slew of conjectures, shoddy/dubious reasoning and exaggerations in there.
Great. Which results in your economy being dependant on the weather. I can see the historical articles now: "The big wind calm of 2030 lead to a nation-wide depression as the metalworking industry was unable to sustain minimum power needed to keep the metal from solidifying."
Well said. He also forgets that we already have problems with failover and unexpected losses of transmission lines which lead to blackouts.
I mean, one could probably design a system which works as he proposes - however, this would almost certainly mean a complete revamp of the existing electrical grid.
At which point investing in storage technology and facilities will be the cheaper and more reliable solution.
I sincerely doubt that teaching matrices in 7th grade raises "understanding and awareness". As I said, I am a teacher and there's a reason why we don't begin with Maxwell's equations when talking about fields.
Again, difficulty of a subject does not automatically yield deeper understanding. You're making the same mistake as anyone who thinks that there's one way to teach: That there's one single way which works best.
There isn't. Teaching effectiveness depends on the pupil, the teacher, the subject, the classmates and a whole slew of other conditions.
And, to drive the point home: Simply raising the difficulty is a very bad way to go about it. Because you will lose the weaker pupils. You're obviously suffering from the notion that what was good for you must be good for others. I'm seeing this all the time: This notion of intellectual superiority just because you yourself mastered some difficult subject or other. Extrapolating from your subjective viewpoint to a general notion is a very big mistake.
I have to say that you seem to make the mistake of regarding quantity equivalent to quality.
Take your bragging about how many books you had to read. I find it pretty hard to believe that you took anything meaningful from reading alot of quite difficult books. What's the use of reading so many books? And please don't try to tell me that you actually read and not merely skimmed them. I mean, we usually cover one book per month during lessons (if that much) but in detail.
Furthermore, matrices are indeed something you don't really need before university - I fail to see the use for that. That's coming from a Physics and Chemistry teacher, by the way.
And the Bavarian school system is moronic. They recently punished a teacher for having a class that was too good. They wanted her to grade her pupils on a bell curve. Again, "hard" is not the same as "good". And, yes, their results in tests like PISA are better (sometimes). But only because the sample groups are actually not comparable.
Then you were going to the wrong school in Germany. There are quite a lot of "old-language" schools in Germany, I myself went to one of them. We could take latin in 7th grade and old greek in 9th grade (with french being an option in 11th grade).
Vacation time is 6 weeks in summer, 2 in autum, 2 in winter and 2 in spring.
Slashdot Mirror
The same argument can be made about the death penalty. As the US justice system has shown repeatedly there are quite a lot of innocent people on death row.
Now the question becomes: Do you rather want to abolish the death penalty so that no innocent people are killed - or do you want to make sure that criminals are killed and accept the innocent victimes as collateral damage?
Benjamin Franklin stated: "It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer". I find it interesting that the US have moved into the completely opposite direction.
Riiight. Because US sex offenders lists contain people who made the mistake of drunkenly pissing against a wall in public... As long as you have those laws, your country doesn't get to be upset about anything regarding people who want to be forgotten.
Not to mention that US laws actually allows the prosecution of minors when their nude shot of themselves gets into the public internet. Because they created child pornography, or so the dubious logic goes.
From the (maximum of) 5 milligrams of mercury? What did you do? Break the lamp very carefully and then snort the contents?
No. The seat limit is also written into the C driving license (trucks) and D driving licenses (busses). Look it up.
Please look up Fahrerlaubnis-Verordnung (FeV) 6:
Klasse B:
Kraftfahrzeuge – ausgenommen Kraftfahrzeuge der Klassen AM, A1, A2 und A – mit einer zulässigen Gesamtmasse von nicht mehr als 3 500 kg, die zur Beförderung von nicht mehr als acht Personen außer dem Fahrzeugführer ausgelegt und gebaut sind (auch mit Anhänger mit einer zulässigen Gesamtmasse von nicht mehr als 750 kg oder mit Anhänger über 750 kg zulässiger Gesamtmasse, sofern 3 500 kg zulässige Gesamtmasse der Kombination nicht überschritten wird).
That's nice. However, I originally quoted the rules of Mitfahrgelegenheit. And they specifically stated that THEY care about the number of seats.
If the number of seats is above 9 then you need a different driver's license in Germany. Everything above 9 already counts as a bus.
If they state that they're using their car for private needs and then go on to use it in a business setting - certainly.
Over here, you insure the car instead of the driver and you also have to tell the insurance company what you're using the car for. Lying to insurance companies was always a bad idea, y'know?
Riiight. You're forgetting one thing: The insurance companies.
As soon as you have been in an accident while driving for Uber, your insurance company WILL drop your contract AND sue you - because the standard insurance contract is not intended for transportation services.
It's a grey area and the companies you link already have had some problems. However, the companies themselves already link the limits on their sites themselves:
The linked article lacks one important detail: The fine of up to 250,000€ is for each instance of breaking the injunction.
Sure, the first violation may only cost 2,000€. But that will go up for every violation. And you can bet your ass that the competitors will use the apps to check on Uber. And they will report any violation they find.
But, hey, a tank needs holidays, too!
Are 76 micrometers thin enough? http://www.nature.com/nmat/jou...
You're wrong there. The VW Up exists as both a pure electric and pure gasoline version. The difference in price? 10,000€
That's the price for the battery. In the case of the Up it almost doubles the price (from 12,000€ to 22,000€). And "all the other bits" being expensive? Seriously?
With the switch to pure electric you just god rid of the following: The alternator which provides the energy for all the gizmos in a normal gasoline car. And, more importantly, the transmission, one of the most complicated and intricate mechanical pieces in a car with a combustion engine.
Two complicated parts of the car, just poof! gone like that. The engine itself also just became way more easy - you don't need carefully timed pistons. You don't need the 3-way catalysator and the lambda probe. And so on and so forth. Hell, if you wanted to you could let each of the 4 wheels be driven by a separate motor! (which gets rid of the need for a differential!).
"Complex / insane" and "aerodynamic" usually don't mix very well. Not to mention that there's the usability factor - you may get an insanely low cv from a teardrop shape. Doesn't mean that it's usable.
Yes. But they're not cheap and the production process is quite involved. And he specifically drew a relation between material used and possible aerodynamics:
[...]Replacing metals with ultralight, ultrastrong materials like carbon-fiber composites can provide safer, lighter and more aerodynamic vehicles that consume severalfold less energy and could be simpler to produce with 80% less capital.[...]
From:"Reinventing Fire: Three Energy Gamechangers for China and the World, Nov. 15th, 2013, pg. 2
He specifically mentioned "more aerodynamic" in addition to "lighter". I'm also not that convinced of "ultrastrong" materials being safer due to the fact that you want a crumple zone to soak up kinetic energy.
Not to mention that "severalfold less energy" is a lie: The BMW i3 already largely consists of carbon-fiber and is not that much lighter and, if you calculate the average energy consumption, doesn't consume that much less energy.
Lastly, carbon-fiber is not more "simpler to produce". Folding, bending and melting metals is easy compared to what you have to go through for carbon-fiber. Not to mention that it's not recycleable. Metal is easy to recycle.
Well, that's the problem with most renewable energy creators: They're dependent on an external factor. So, keeping some in "reserve" might not exactly yield the result you want. What use are additional windmills is there's no wind? What use are solar panels if it's nighttime or overcast?
Yes, there are others like biogas or waterpower, but most of those would fall under this heading of "energy storage" which this guy proposes to be superfluous. If they aren't storage technologies, they're usually not scalable enough, either due to provisioning problems (biogas) or geographical restrictions (water).
I did read some parts of it. For instance, he proposed that switching to carbon-fiber instead of metals that we would be able to create more aerodynamic shapes. Which is rubbish, of course, the shape of a car is not dependent on the material used.
He also proposed that switching to carbon-fiber would reduce costs. Far from it: Production of carbon-fiber is a very expensive process due to the way the shapes are formed. One of the reasons, by the way, why the BMW i3 is quite expensive.
There were a whole slew of conjectures, shoddy/dubious reasoning and exaggerations in there.
Yeah, I just read that rubbish. Numbers which appear from thin air, false causal relations and shoddy reasoning. I didn't enjoy that at all.
Great. Which results in your economy being dependant on the weather. I can see the historical articles now: "The big wind calm of 2030 lead to a nation-wide depression as the metalworking industry was unable to sustain minimum power needed to keep the metal from solidifying."
Well said. He also forgets that we already have problems with failover and unexpected losses of transmission lines which lead to blackouts.
I mean, one could probably design a system which works as he proposes - however, this would almost certainly mean a complete revamp of the existing electrical grid.
At which point investing in storage technology and facilities will be the cheaper and more reliable solution.
Irrelevant. Cops are SUPPOSED to shoot people because that's what they are paid for.
There's something very, very wrong with your views on what the cops are supposed to do.
I sincerely doubt that teaching matrices in 7th grade raises "understanding and awareness". As I said, I am a teacher and there's a reason why we don't begin with Maxwell's equations when talking about fields.
Again, difficulty of a subject does not automatically yield deeper understanding. You're making the same mistake as anyone who thinks that there's one way to teach: That there's one single way which works best.
There isn't. Teaching effectiveness depends on the pupil, the teacher, the subject, the classmates and a whole slew of other conditions.
And, to drive the point home: Simply raising the difficulty is a very bad way to go about it. Because you will lose the weaker pupils. You're obviously suffering from the notion that what was good for you must be good for others. I'm seeing this all the time: This notion of intellectual superiority just because you yourself mastered some difficult subject or other. Extrapolating from your subjective viewpoint to a general notion is a very big mistake.
I have to say that you seem to make the mistake of regarding quantity equivalent to quality.
Take your bragging about how many books you had to read. I find it pretty hard to believe that you took anything meaningful from reading alot of quite difficult books. What's the use of reading so many books? And please don't try to tell me that you actually read and not merely skimmed them. I mean, we usually cover one book per month during lessons (if that much) but in detail.
Furthermore, matrices are indeed something you don't really need before university - I fail to see the use for that. That's coming from a Physics and Chemistry teacher, by the way.
And the Bavarian school system is moronic. They recently punished a teacher for having a class that was too good. They wanted her to grade her pupils on a bell curve. Again, "hard" is not the same as "good". And, yes, their results in tests like PISA are better (sometimes). But only because the sample groups are actually not comparable.
Then you were going to the wrong school in Germany. There are quite a lot of "old-language" schools in Germany, I myself went to one of them. We could take latin in 7th grade and old greek in 9th grade (with french being an option in 11th grade).
Vacation time is 6 weeks in summer, 2 in autum, 2 in winter and 2 in spring.