Right, I see the big automakers dipping their toes into the water now, since they are still mostly interested in selling big SUVs which make them a ton of money (in the US at least). With the cost of batteries still being high, they can't hope to make that much from EVs yet. On the other hand, a switch to EVs seems inevitable over the next 10 years or so, they just have so many advantages once the batteries are cheaper. So they sell a trickle, work on their battery designs, and wait for battery prices to come down. When that happens, maybe they'll just buy batteries from Tesla or LG or China or make their own, that remains to be seen.
I get that it's great that infrastructure is improving, but does this really matter? Once you get above a certain point (for me, on a phone, that's about 3 Mbps) it's "fast enough" and other factors become more important. For me, those are basically cost and coverage. Verizon is bad on cost, good on coverage, so for me, AT&T through Cricket is the better choice - lower cost and almost as good coverage. Sprint coverage around me is not good enough; T-Mo coverage is just barely good enough. All are plenty fast for what I need a phone to do.
I think the point is that it's entirely possible for anyone to come out with open source self driving car software. No one has. Google has dumped billions of dollars into testing and developing these things. If they didn't have the assurance that they could use the stuff they developed as they wished, they wouldn't have done it in the first place.
Will there be some sort of framework developed over time where edge cases can be shared between platforms? Probably. But we are a long way off from that.
Drivers that remain alert, look ahead and use good practices such as slowing down to appropriate speeds for conditions decrease their odds even more.
True. However, I'm a pretty good driver; not reckless, leave good distance to the car in front, speed appropriate to conditions, etc. Just last night I was coming home on a route I have driven at least a hundred times and missed a turn because I was thinking of various things and my wife, who is usually aware of where we are too also failed to notice. These kinds of lapses happen to everyone at some point, and sometimes they have consequences worse than driving a couple of miles out of the way.
the CDC estimates that there are 45,000 deaths a year from *second hand* exposure to cigarette smoke. Maybe that is something we should tackle first
This incident should be used to not only focus Uber's attention on safety, but everyone else working on these cars. Don't forget, in addition to deaths there are huge numbers of injuries from auto accidents (in the US, over 4 million requiring medical consultation annually), and the expansion of mobility to the elderly or blind will be positive for society too. I doubt that Waymo's efforts are really stopping anti smoking policies; it's totally possible to be working on both at the same time.
Some "goods", like the military, are best paid for through taxes. Although I don't always agree to the uses which such goods are put to, I accept that I should pay my taxes as society as a whole has outlined.
For more tangible consumer goods I don't see much benefit in using public subsidies to distort or hide the cost of delivery. Thus I am in favor of taxing truck fleets proportional to the damage they do to the roads, and if a reasonable estimate of the cost of externalities like pollution and congestion can be calculated for various modes I am ok with taxing them based on that too.
I agree that in some cases society as a whole benefits from expenses like rural infrastructure, and again I am happy to have my taxes used for these. All I ask is that we evaluate the costs and benefits on a rational basis. I realize I may ask too much...
Sure, but I don't have a problem with paying the true cost of goods. If my grocery bill goes up $1 in response to the damage the truck caused, it's fair.
If you were designing a truly rational transportation system in the future you could balance the weight of the load over multiple lighter autonomous vehicles, and size them to be in the sweet spot for the least possible damage for a given efficiency.
Most TVs come with a USB port, so you can power some of those HDMI devices right from the TV, albeit with an extra cable on the back.
I did this for a while with a Fire Stick, but it would complain that it wasn't getting enough power sometimes so I ended up using an external USB charger with it. Newer devices should have lower power requirements though, and better TVs might have more powerful USB ports.
Oh, I think trucks are an important part of our infrastructure. I also think that they should not essentially be subsidized by other road users; if they paid their fair share, it may be that bulk rail would expand, for example.
I also think that many truckers are going to be replaced / experience lower demand due to automation over the next ten years or so. If I were a truck driver I'd be looking into specializing, like concrete trucks or something.
Solar is a game changer in that it places the means of production squarely in the hands of the consumer.
Yeah, to a certain extent. But for me, and lots of others, home solar isn't a great option due to space and tree cover. Even if there were no costs associated with installation and maintenance, I would have a hard time finding room to get enough solar to cover my use. I'm going to be grid connected (even if it's just to a local solar farm in a former cornfield) for quite some time.
A number of states simply add a fee to the registration of EVs to cover the loss of the gas tax. The problem is, they usually seem to set this at a punitive rate which equals 30k miles per year in a 20mpg truck or something. Despite this, it is an easy solution so will probably spread.
Logically, however, more tax should be paid by the trucking industry since road damage is related to the 4th power of the relative loads; a single loaded truck will cause more damage than 9000 passenger cars. Politically this is unlikely to happen.
Don't overlook the noise-cancelling part; while Bose may not have the best sound, it seems pretty universally agreed that they have the best noise cancelling. If Apple can match them on that front then they'd probably sell a lot on that basis alone.
I have an ICE and a Leaf (~100 mile range). I use the Leaf for almost all my trips now, but the ICE is still easier for certain situations. Once the standard range is 250+ miles, though, I would have no problem ditching the ICE and being all-EV. Having lived with the Leaf for a while now I think that 250 miles is the point where 97% of my trips would be super easy, and 3% would require some thought or compromises. I'd be totally comfortable with that. For those who aren't comfortable with that, there's the Volt or Prius Prime etc. I just don't want to be lugging around an engine which I would rarely need in a vehicle with a decent range.
My utility offers EV owners (and only EV owners) access to off peak rates, presumably to deal with exactly this. And it works; I set up my car to only charge in the off-peak hours and haven't overridden it yet. Maybe once a month I'll charge at a fast charger outside those hours, on a longer trip. I think it's going to be pretty easy to keep charging in the desired time periods.
It would seem likely that any bans could easily be phased in with warnings - for example, this small area will be off limits next year, a larger area the year after, etc.
This would give most people who both need to drive in those areas and have a diesel to try to sell/exchange their car. I realize that this would probably cause problems for some people, but so does nitrogen oxide which seems to be over the EU limits in a bunch of urban areas in Germany.
Sure, but the fact is in a lot of places taxi were/are a real pain to get, expensive, and often only wanted to take cash. From a user perspective the lower price and convenience are a huge draw. Taxis need to up their game in other ways if they can't compete on price.
The most interesting part of the article was towards the bottom:
SpaceX has said it will offer speeds of up to a gigabit per second, with latencies between 25ms and 35ms. Those latencies would make SpaceX's service comparable to cable and fiber. Today's satellite broadband services use satellites in much higher orbits and thus have latencies of 600ms or more, according to FCC measurements.
The demonstration satellites will orbit at 511km, although the operational satellites are planned to orbit at altitudes ranging from 1,110km to 1,325km. By contrast, the existing HughesNet satellite network has an altitude of about 35,400km, making for a much longer round-trip time than ground-based networks.
I think cord cutting mainly works for people who pirate or who watch so little TV that the dregs on Netflix are sufficient.
That's pretty much me - I watch, maybe, a couple of hours of "TV" a week; usually that's a movie, and likely as not it's one that's not even streaming. I subscribe to Netflix streaming mostly for the kids, Netflix DVDs mostly for my wife and me, and Amazon Prime because I'm using it anyway. For the Olympics/Super Bowl/other big live TV stuff, I have an old media center PC hooked to an antenna. I'm just about to replace that PC with a new OTA DVR thing (Channel Master Stream+) which looks like it will do the same job but in a much lower power, smaller format. I feel like I have much more stuff available than I will ever get around to watching.
On the other hand, lots of us touch railings and shake people's hands regularly, and yet we don't get sick all that often really. You may actually want to look into some treatment - I know some people with germophobia and it has had a detrimental effect on their quality of life.
In theory I could be almost 100% remote, but I prefer to be in the office and interact more naturally with my colleagues. I do the odd day remotely, and I usually get some project that I've been putting off done then, but I wouldn't want to be remote more than one or two days a week tops.
It helps that I can walk to the office, of course.
EVs for sure, but let's try to charge them off wind/solar please? Otherwise you're shifting the efficiency problem from your engine bay to the grid. I hate smug EV drivers boasting about "clean" driving. They get all flustered when I point out that grid-charging has all sorts of issues from coal-fired electricity.
Even if you're in the midwest, with the dirtiest electric mix around, an EV is generally going to be cleaner than most vehicles. And keep in mind that the mix should only get cleaner with time. On the coasts an EV is going to be cleaner than any internal combustion engine vehicle. The Union of Concerned Scientists have some good information on this: https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-v... https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-v...
I like my motorcycle too, but I'm looking forward to a quiet electric motorcycle with lots of instant torque. They're still too expensive for my taste though.
RT Critics have it below 30%; the audience is more like you, 86%.
I like RT for this - I can pretty easily figure out that a movie like this is going to be pretty enjoyable, but probably not earthshattering or innovative.
If both the critics and the audience agree that it sucks, though, it will probably suck. See any Adam Sandler movie.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, I see the big automakers dipping their toes into the water now, since they are still mostly interested in selling big SUVs which make them a ton of money (in the US at least). With the cost of batteries still being high, they can't hope to make that much from EVs yet. On the other hand, a switch to EVs seems inevitable over the next 10 years or so, they just have so many advantages once the batteries are cheaper. So they sell a trickle, work on their battery designs, and wait for battery prices to come down. When that happens, maybe they'll just buy batteries from Tesla or LG or China or make their own, that remains to be seen.
I get that it's great that infrastructure is improving, but does this really matter? Once you get above a certain point (for me, on a phone, that's about 3 Mbps) it's "fast enough" and other factors become more important. For me, those are basically cost and coverage. Verizon is bad on cost, good on coverage, so for me, AT&T through Cricket is the better choice - lower cost and almost as good coverage. Sprint coverage around me is not good enough; T-Mo coverage is just barely good enough. All are plenty fast for what I need a phone to do.
I think the point is that it's entirely possible for anyone to come out with open source self driving car software. No one has. Google has dumped billions of dollars into testing and developing these things. If they didn't have the assurance that they could use the stuff they developed as they wished, they wouldn't have done it in the first place.
Will there be some sort of framework developed over time where edge cases can be shared between platforms? Probably. But we are a long way off from that.
Drivers that remain alert, look ahead and use good practices such as slowing down to appropriate speeds for conditions decrease their odds even more.
True. However, I'm a pretty good driver; not reckless, leave good distance to the car in front, speed appropriate to conditions, etc. Just last night I was coming home on a route I have driven at least a hundred times and missed a turn because I was thinking of various things and my wife, who is usually aware of where we are too also failed to notice. These kinds of lapses happen to everyone at some point, and sometimes they have consequences worse than driving a couple of miles out of the way.
the CDC estimates that there are 45,000 deaths a year from *second hand* exposure to cigarette smoke. Maybe that is something we should tackle first
This incident should be used to not only focus Uber's attention on safety, but everyone else working on these cars. Don't forget, in addition to deaths there are huge numbers of injuries from auto accidents (in the US, over 4 million requiring medical consultation annually), and the expansion of mobility to the elderly or blind will be positive for society too. I doubt that Waymo's efforts are really stopping anti smoking policies; it's totally possible to be working on both at the same time.
Some "goods", like the military, are best paid for through taxes. Although I don't always agree to the uses which such goods are put to, I accept that I should pay my taxes as society as a whole has outlined.
For more tangible consumer goods I don't see much benefit in using public subsidies to distort or hide the cost of delivery. Thus I am in favor of taxing truck fleets proportional to the damage they do to the roads, and if a reasonable estimate of the cost of externalities like pollution and congestion can be calculated for various modes I am ok with taxing them based on that too.
I agree that in some cases society as a whole benefits from expenses like rural infrastructure, and again I am happy to have my taxes used for these. All I ask is that we evaluate the costs and benefits on a rational basis. I realize I may ask too much...
Sure, but I don't have a problem with paying the true cost of goods. If my grocery bill goes up $1 in response to the damage the truck caused, it's fair.
If you were designing a truly rational transportation system in the future you could balance the weight of the load over multiple lighter autonomous vehicles, and size them to be in the sweet spot for the least possible damage for a given efficiency.
Most TVs come with a USB port, so you can power some of those HDMI devices right from the TV, albeit with an extra cable on the back.
I did this for a while with a Fire Stick, but it would complain that it wasn't getting enough power sometimes so I ended up using an external USB charger with it. Newer devices should have lower power requirements though, and better TVs might have more powerful USB ports.
Oh, I think trucks are an important part of our infrastructure. I also think that they should not essentially be subsidized by other road users; if they paid their fair share, it may be that bulk rail would expand, for example.
I also think that many truckers are going to be replaced / experience lower demand due to automation over the next ten years or so. If I were a truck driver I'd be looking into specializing, like concrete trucks or something.
Solar is a game changer in that it places the means of production squarely in the hands of the consumer.
Yeah, to a certain extent. But for me, and lots of others, home solar isn't a great option due to space and tree cover. Even if there were no costs associated with installation and maintenance, I would have a hard time finding room to get enough solar to cover my use. I'm going to be grid connected (even if it's just to a local solar farm in a former cornfield) for quite some time.
A number of states simply add a fee to the registration of EVs to cover the loss of the gas tax. The problem is, they usually seem to set this at a punitive rate which equals 30k miles per year in a 20mpg truck or something. Despite this, it is an easy solution so will probably spread.
Logically, however, more tax should be paid by the trucking industry since road damage is related to the 4th power of the relative loads; a single loaded truck will cause more damage than 9000 passenger cars. Politically this is unlikely to happen.
Don't overlook the noise-cancelling part; while Bose may not have the best sound, it seems pretty universally agreed that they have the best noise cancelling. If Apple can match them on that front then they'd probably sell a lot on that basis alone.
I have an ICE and a Leaf (~100 mile range). I use the Leaf for almost all my trips now, but the ICE is still easier for certain situations. Once the standard range is 250+ miles, though, I would have no problem ditching the ICE and being all-EV. Having lived with the Leaf for a while now I think that 250 miles is the point where 97% of my trips would be super easy, and 3% would require some thought or compromises. I'd be totally comfortable with that. For those who aren't comfortable with that, there's the Volt or Prius Prime etc. I just don't want to be lugging around an engine which I would rarely need in a vehicle with a decent range.
My utility offers EV owners (and only EV owners) access to off peak rates, presumably to deal with exactly this. And it works; I set up my car to only charge in the off-peak hours and haven't overridden it yet. Maybe once a month I'll charge at a fast charger outside those hours, on a longer trip. I think it's going to be pretty easy to keep charging in the desired time periods.
It would seem likely that any bans could easily be phased in with warnings - for example, this small area will be off limits next year, a larger area the year after, etc.
This would give most people who both need to drive in those areas and have a diesel to try to sell/exchange their car. I realize that this would probably cause problems for some people, but so does nitrogen oxide which seems to be over the EU limits in a bunch of urban areas in Germany.
One big reason for these would be to improve the aerodynamics. Side mirrors cause a lot of drag at speed.
Sure, but the fact is in a lot of places taxi were/are a real pain to get, expensive, and often only wanted to take cash. From a user perspective the lower price and convenience are a huge draw. Taxis need to up their game in other ways if they can't compete on price.
The most interesting part of the article was towards the bottom:
SpaceX has said it will offer speeds of up to a gigabit per second, with latencies between 25ms and 35ms. Those latencies would make SpaceX's service comparable to cable and fiber. Today's satellite broadband services use satellites in much higher orbits and thus have latencies of 600ms or more, according to FCC measurements.
The demonstration satellites will orbit at 511km, although the operational satellites are planned to orbit at altitudes ranging from 1,110km to 1,325km. By contrast, the existing HughesNet satellite network has an altitude of about 35,400km, making for a much longer round-trip time than ground-based networks.
I think cord cutting mainly works for people who pirate or who watch so little TV that the dregs on Netflix are sufficient.
That's pretty much me - I watch, maybe, a couple of hours of "TV" a week; usually that's a movie, and likely as not it's one that's not even streaming. I subscribe to Netflix streaming mostly for the kids, Netflix DVDs mostly for my wife and me, and Amazon Prime because I'm using it anyway. For the Olympics/Super Bowl/other big live TV stuff, I have an old media center PC hooked to an antenna. I'm just about to replace that PC with a new OTA DVR thing (Channel Master Stream+) which looks like it will do the same job but in a much lower power, smaller format. I feel like I have much more stuff available than I will ever get around to watching.
That's not like the people I know, that's pretty much just good sense! ;)
On the other hand, lots of us touch railings and shake people's hands regularly, and yet we don't get sick all that often really. You may actually want to look into some treatment - I know some people with germophobia and it has had a detrimental effect on their quality of life.
If you have a chromecast device plugged into your TV, you can then display video from your phone or whatever on the bigger screen.
Lots of places tax AirBnB stays, so that seems unlikely to be the root cause.
In theory I could be almost 100% remote, but I prefer to be in the office and interact more naturally with my colleagues. I do the odd day remotely, and I usually get some project that I've been putting off done then, but I wouldn't want to be remote more than one or two days a week tops.
It helps that I can walk to the office, of course.
EVs for sure, but let's try to charge them off wind/solar please? Otherwise you're shifting the efficiency problem from your engine bay to the grid. I hate smug EV drivers boasting about "clean" driving. They get all flustered when I point out that grid-charging has all sorts of issues from coal-fired electricity.
Even if you're in the midwest, with the dirtiest electric mix around, an EV is generally going to be cleaner than most vehicles. And keep in mind that the mix should only get cleaner with time. On the coasts an EV is going to be cleaner than any internal combustion engine vehicle. The Union of Concerned Scientists have some good information on this:
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-v...
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-v...
I like my motorcycle too, but I'm looking forward to a quiet electric motorcycle with lots of instant torque. They're still too expensive for my taste though.
RT Critics have it below 30%; the audience is more like you, 86%.
I like RT for this - I can pretty easily figure out that a movie like this is going to be pretty enjoyable, but probably not earthshattering or innovative.
If both the critics and the audience agree that it sucks, though, it will probably suck. See any Adam Sandler movie.