They didn't lobby for all the comments on the FCC's website against the idea of allowing people to talk on the phone on planes. People have had enough of the poor experience modern flying is, and are demanding some standards to keep it from getting any worse. This one is perfectly sensible; with the new mobile devices rules, people can feel free to text or email during the flight all they want. They don't need to talk.
Exactly. With new FCC rules allowing people to use their phones and other mobile devices in-flight (without turning them off during takeoff and landing), people don't need to talk anyway, they can just text or email from their smartphone. These forms of communication are totally silent and won't bother surrounding passengers the way loudly talking on a phone does.
Yes, this is why a lot of merchants require you to verify the billing address of the credit card before they'll ship to you, and some will only ship to that address. For instance, if you sell on Ebay or with Paypal, Paypal only gives sellers their "seller protection" if they ship to "verified addresses" (either the billing address or some other address that's been verified by Paypal somehow).
That's because libraries have changed from a place where people can go to read and borrow books, to a place where poor people can surf the internet and read facebook and look at porn. It doesn't cost that much in funding to get a bunch of 10-year-old computers and put them on one slow internet connection. So yes, lots of people are using libraries, but not in their traditional capacity, but rather as more of a general hang-out. In New York, lots of people (not poor) visit the main branch of the NYPL (the one seen in the first scene of Ghostbusters), but they're not reading books there, they're just sitting in the "reading rooms" and using the free WiFi (probably because their tiny apartments are too small or noisy to actually sit down and enjoy some peace and quiet).
I consciously chose Elvis as the face of rock & roll, knowing that this was a horrible thing to do, as he didn't really introduce anything new to the genre except his skin color.
That doesn't sound accurate; Elvis is known as one of the early pioneers of rockabilly, which is a fusion of country and rhythm-and-blues, and is a forerunner of modern rock.
I'm sorry, that's just not true. I've seen plenty of people who have survived motorcycle accidents. Oh sure, they ended up losing a leg and dying young due to painkiller overmedication, or becoming a quadriplegic and living out the rest of his life in a nursing home, but they survived!
Chip and Pin is only for payment at a physical point of sale. Online transactions use your card number+expiration date+CVV (or whatever it's called) number, and aren't any more or less secure than with chipless cards.
That's not that big a problem though: if someone buys something online, they'll need to have it shipped somewhere. If it's fraudulent, it'll be pretty easy to catch the thief when they have the item shipped to their home using a stolen credit card number.
I never said the taxis were cheap; we don't use econocars for taxis here in the US either. But as I understand it, Mercedes has a lot of cars, including small economy cars, which aren't sold in the US.
Thinking of the NYC subway system, which people are you talking about? The tickets are sold in automated machines, and they're checked by automated turnstiles. The only humans involved are maybe the subway cops who'll give you a ticket for jumping the turnstile. But they need to be there anyway just to keep order and catch pickpockets and break up fights. In fact, if they weren't wasting their time watching for turnstile-jumpers, they'd be able to devote more attention to more important things, like making sure no one's getting mugged or pickpocketed.
For you, maybe. For some broke-ass person on minimum wage, saving a buck or two a day is substantial. We're talking about public transit here; lots of the people riding it aren't exactly doing well financially.
No, it applies to just about any physical product, not just copyrighted ones. If you buy a pen, pencil, computer, car, roll of toilet paper, etc., you can do what you want with those, and re-sell them if you want, or give them away or trade them.
Of course, tickets aren't exactly physical products; if we look at airline tickets, for instance, they're tied to your identity and aren't transferable. Yes, they're a piece of paper, but that's just a security item; what you're really buying is passage.
Otherwise I'd still be out there somewhere, in the woods most likely, waiting for the inevitable collapse-via-inertia of a society which did not adhere to its principles.
This society IS collapsing. The question is how quickly. It's not much different from the Roman Empire and its decline and fall. But if you remember, it took hundreds of years for the Roman Empire to completely collapse (and even that was only in the western half; the eastern half continued for another 1000 years). Other empires collapse quite suddenly. It's hard to say how long this one will last.
That looks almost exactly like the Model S chassis demos. And you're right, the ground clearance sucks; it's definitely an on-street vehicle only, aimed at rich bimbo soccer moms like you said.
Anyway, I only said that the current Teslas have a single motor (plus transmission plus differential). With the Model X, clearly they're just doubling everything, and putting in two motors (front and rear), each with its own transmission and differential.
Bull. If the CV joints are (to grab a number from the air) 90% efficient at power transfer, and the total cruise hp is 20, then two front CV joints passing 10 hp each waste a total of 2 hp, and four CV joints front and rear passing 5 hp each waste a total of... tada... exactly the same 2 hp.
And exactly the same with the transmissions and differentials.
You're totally forgetting about frictional losses. Why else do you think AWD cars always get significantly worse fuel economy than their non-AWD counterparts? Even though the engine is running at the same rpm for any given speed, it has to overcome higher frictional losses in the drivetrain since there's an extra differential and pair of CV axles to drive.
Your note on four individual electric motors is dead on, however. It's a big lost opportunity. And you could definitely buil;d wheel motors with integral gear reduction.
Maybe, so I'm wondering why Tesla didn't take this route. Surely they explored it and chose the current, more traditional gearbox + differential route for some kind of engineering or economic reason.
No, they'll still have the same problem. There's no longitudinal shaft, but there is an extra set of CV joints (with a non-shallow angle: this is an SUV with greater ground clearance), and an extra differential, and an extra transmission. You left the last two out of your last paragraph: Teslas have a single motor, plus a transmission (single-speed gearbox), plus a differential, plus CV joints/driveshafts. They're really not that much different from a regular car; they've only replaced the engine with an electric motor, and reduced the number of speeds in the transmission to 1 (which granted, is more efficient than a multi-speed transmission, but not that much).
Honestly, I am a little surprised they didn't use a system with separate L + R electric motors directly driving driveshafts. This would have made it easy to have limited-slip (since the motors can be driven at different speeds), and saved the inefficiency of a transmission and differential. Maybe the size of the motors would have been impractical that way, however, since they'd have to develop high torque instead of being high speed and using gearing to develop the necessary torque.
100F is just above human body temperature. If it's that hot, it's too hot for humans to be comfortable. IIRC, that point of the Fahrenheit scale was selected because of its relation to human body temperature (obviously there was a slight inaccuracy, with it being hundreds of years ago). Yes, outside temperatures do exceed 100 in some places, but usually those are called "deserts" or "tropical", and even so, they don't typically exceed 110F too much. In the American southwest, it almost never goes above 120F, and in the middle-eastern desert, it gets up to a maximum of 135F or so IIRC. These aren't normal environments.
It's pretty simple: if it's 100F or higher, I really don't want to be outside (and I've lived in Phoenix, so I know what that's like; there's a reason that city only became large after the invention of air conditioning). And if it's 0F or colder, I really don't want to be outside. Temperatures within this range are very common, temperatures outside are uncommon unless you live in an extreme (non-temperate) environment. It's a good scale for measuring outdoor temperatures, much better than Celcius. Yes, it sucks for unit conversions, but who cares? I haven't done those since Chemistry class in college, and it's easy to remember the conversion factors for those few times I might want to (or, you can just Google it).
The difference is that SI is a coherent system of base and derived units with very simple relationships between them, all based on the number 10 and a series of greek prefixes.
I've never heard of "megadegrees", "centidegrees", "millidegrees", etc. Nor have I ever heard of "megaseconds", "kiloseconds", etc. It doesn't seem like the SI system is quite as coherent as its proponents make it out to be.
Tesla is an American company, so they have to go by American terminology. "Wagon" is shorthand for "station wagon", which is passe in America unfortunately. "Estate" has no meaning in America as far as cars go; an "estate" is all your belongings when you die, or it's a big mansion a rich person lives in. And WTF is "shooting brake", some kind of in-joke?
No, it's because Mercedes is like GM over there, but without different "brands" (Chevy, Buick, Cadillac, GMC). Over here, we have GM selling both shitty little Aveos and high-end Cadillacs, and big GMC trucks (and previously giant Hummers, and Pontiac/Saturn 2-seaters, etc. before they downsized). The high-end Cadillac buyers aren't put off by the Aveos. It's the same over there, except it's all one brand, Mercedes. They make a whole range of vehicles. It's just that they don't sell that whole range over here, they only sell the luxury cars.
AWD, at least on typical gas-powered cars, reduces fuel economy significantly, usually 2-3mpg. All that extra spinning mass and gearing takes energy to turn. Regular (manual) car transmissions already impose a ~15% hit on fuel economy; that's how much energy is lost just using some gears to multiply your torque (and decrease the output shaft rpm by a proportional amount). CV joints also impose a fuel-economy hit. Of course, it's pretty hard to drive without these, so we accept them, but putting more gearing and more shafts in (to support 4 driven wheels instead of 2) just uses up that much more energy.
I haven't seen the gullwings on this vehicle, but on other cars they usually use less parking space, not more. On the DeLorean, they were hinged in the middle of the roof, so when they opened up, they really didn't protrude much from the car, much less than a conventional door. It's really easy to get in and out of a DeLorean even in tight parking spaces. I doubt these are much different, otherwise they wouldn't be called "gull-wing" (when both doors are opened, they look like a gull, due to the hinges being in the middle of the roof, causing the door to have an "L" shape).
So what about filesystems? What are you going to do when your hard drive, with ext4-formatted filesystems, has a problem and you want to plug it into a system that only supports ext3? That's right, you can't. Of course, this isn't a problem now since ext4 is common, but it was when ext4 was brand-new, and it's probably still a problem if you try this with btrfs. Did you make the same complaint about ext4 (and ext3 before it), that you wouldn't be able to use it on older OS installations?
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They didn't lobby for all the comments on the FCC's website against the idea of allowing people to talk on the phone on planes. People have had enough of the poor experience modern flying is, and are demanding some standards to keep it from getting any worse. This one is perfectly sensible; with the new mobile devices rules, people can feel free to text or email during the flight all they want. They don't need to talk.
Exactly. With new FCC rules allowing people to use their phones and other mobile devices in-flight (without turning them off during takeoff and landing), people don't need to talk anyway, they can just text or email from their smartphone. These forms of communication are totally silent and won't bother surrounding passengers the way loudly talking on a phone does.
Yes, this is why a lot of merchants require you to verify the billing address of the credit card before they'll ship to you, and some will only ship to that address. For instance, if you sell on Ebay or with Paypal, Paypal only gives sellers their "seller protection" if they ship to "verified addresses" (either the billing address or some other address that's been verified by Paypal somehow).
That's because libraries have changed from a place where people can go to read and borrow books, to a place where poor people can surf the internet and read facebook and look at porn. It doesn't cost that much in funding to get a bunch of 10-year-old computers and put them on one slow internet connection. So yes, lots of people are using libraries, but not in their traditional capacity, but rather as more of a general hang-out. In New York, lots of people (not poor) visit the main branch of the NYPL (the one seen in the first scene of Ghostbusters), but they're not reading books there, they're just sitting in the "reading rooms" and using the free WiFi (probably because their tiny apartments are too small or noisy to actually sit down and enjoy some peace and quiet).
I consciously chose Elvis as the face of rock & roll, knowing that this was a horrible thing to do, as he didn't really introduce anything new to the genre except his skin color.
That doesn't sound accurate; Elvis is known as one of the early pioneers of rockabilly, which is a fusion of country and rhythm-and-blues, and is a forerunner of modern rock.
Another great classical composer was Prokofiev, and he died in 1953, even later than Rachmaninov.
Personally, I generally prefer Baroque music to Classical.
A bike isn't practical on American roads either, with morons driving giant SUVs around at insane speeds while texting.
I'm sorry, that's just not true. I've seen plenty of people who have survived motorcycle accidents. Oh sure, they ended up losing a leg and dying young due to painkiller overmedication, or becoming a quadriplegic and living out the rest of his life in a nursing home, but they survived!
Chip and Pin is only for payment at a physical point of sale. Online transactions use your card number+expiration date+CVV (or whatever it's called) number, and aren't any more or less secure than with chipless cards.
That's not that big a problem though: if someone buys something online, they'll need to have it shipped somewhere. If it's fraudulent, it'll be pretty easy to catch the thief when they have the item shipped to their home using a stolen credit card number.
I never said the taxis were cheap; we don't use econocars for taxis here in the US either. But as I understand it, Mercedes has a lot of cars, including small economy cars, which aren't sold in the US.
Thinking of the NYC subway system, which people are you talking about? The tickets are sold in automated machines, and they're checked by automated turnstiles. The only humans involved are maybe the subway cops who'll give you a ticket for jumping the turnstile. But they need to be there anyway just to keep order and catch pickpockets and break up fights. In fact, if they weren't wasting their time watching for turnstile-jumpers, they'd be able to devote more attention to more important things, like making sure no one's getting mugged or pickpocketed.
For you, maybe. For some broke-ass person on minimum wage, saving a buck or two a day is substantial. We're talking about public transit here; lots of the people riding it aren't exactly doing well financially.
No, it applies to just about any physical product, not just copyrighted ones. If you buy a pen, pencil, computer, car, roll of toilet paper, etc., you can do what you want with those, and re-sell them if you want, or give them away or trade them.
Of course, tickets aren't exactly physical products; if we look at airline tickets, for instance, they're tied to your identity and aren't transferable. Yes, they're a piece of paper, but that's just a security item; what you're really buying is passage.
Otherwise I'd still be out there somewhere, in the woods most likely, waiting for the inevitable collapse-via-inertia of a society which did not adhere to its principles.
This society IS collapsing. The question is how quickly. It's not much different from the Roman Empire and its decline and fall. But if you remember, it took hundreds of years for the Roman Empire to completely collapse (and even that was only in the western half; the eastern half continued for another 1000 years). Other empires collapse quite suddenly. It's hard to say how long this one will last.
That looks almost exactly like the Model S chassis demos. And you're right, the ground clearance sucks; it's definitely an on-street vehicle only, aimed at rich bimbo soccer moms like you said.
Anyway, I only said that the current Teslas have a single motor (plus transmission plus differential). With the Model X, clearly they're just doubling everything, and putting in two motors (front and rear), each with its own transmission and differential.
Bull. If the CV joints are (to grab a number from the air) 90% efficient at power transfer, and the total cruise hp is 20, then two front CV joints passing 10 hp each waste a total of 2 hp, and four CV joints front and rear passing 5 hp each waste a total of ... tada ... exactly the same 2 hp.
And exactly the same with the transmissions and differentials.
You're totally forgetting about frictional losses. Why else do you think AWD cars always get significantly worse fuel economy than their non-AWD counterparts? Even though the engine is running at the same rpm for any given speed, it has to overcome higher frictional losses in the drivetrain since there's an extra differential and pair of CV axles to drive.
Your note on four individual electric motors is dead on, however. It's a big lost opportunity. And you could definitely buil;d wheel motors with integral gear reduction.
Maybe, so I'm wondering why Tesla didn't take this route. Surely they explored it and chose the current, more traditional gearbox + differential route for some kind of engineering or economic reason.
No, they'll still have the same problem. There's no longitudinal shaft, but there is an extra set of CV joints (with a non-shallow angle: this is an SUV with greater ground clearance), and an extra differential, and an extra transmission. You left the last two out of your last paragraph: Teslas have a single motor, plus a transmission (single-speed gearbox), plus a differential, plus CV joints/driveshafts. They're really not that much different from a regular car; they've only replaced the engine with an electric motor, and reduced the number of speeds in the transmission to 1 (which granted, is more efficient than a multi-speed transmission, but not that much).
Honestly, I am a little surprised they didn't use a system with separate L + R electric motors directly driving driveshafts. This would have made it easy to have limited-slip (since the motors can be driven at different speeds), and saved the inefficiency of a transmission and differential. Maybe the size of the motors would have been impractical that way, however, since they'd have to develop high torque instead of being high speed and using gearing to develop the necessary torque.
100 degrees C = water boils
We "encounter" these temperatures all the time
I've never heard of anyplace on Earth where the outside air temperature reaches 100C, or anywhere close to it, except maybe the mouth of a volcano.
100F is just above human body temperature. If it's that hot, it's too hot for humans to be comfortable. IIRC, that point of the Fahrenheit scale was selected because of its relation to human body temperature (obviously there was a slight inaccuracy, with it being hundreds of years ago). Yes, outside temperatures do exceed 100 in some places, but usually those are called "deserts" or "tropical", and even so, they don't typically exceed 110F too much. In the American southwest, it almost never goes above 120F, and in the middle-eastern desert, it gets up to a maximum of 135F or so IIRC. These aren't normal environments.
It's pretty simple: if it's 100F or higher, I really don't want to be outside (and I've lived in Phoenix, so I know what that's like; there's a reason that city only became large after the invention of air conditioning). And if it's 0F or colder, I really don't want to be outside. Temperatures within this range are very common, temperatures outside are uncommon unless you live in an extreme (non-temperate) environment. It's a good scale for measuring outdoor temperatures, much better than Celcius. Yes, it sucks for unit conversions, but who cares? I haven't done those since Chemistry class in college, and it's easy to remember the conversion factors for those few times I might want to (or, you can just Google it).
The difference is that SI is a coherent system of base and derived units with very simple relationships between them, all based on the number 10 and a series of greek prefixes.
I've never heard of "megadegrees", "centidegrees", "millidegrees", etc. Nor have I ever heard of "megaseconds", "kiloseconds", etc. It doesn't seem like the SI system is quite as coherent as its proponents make it out to be.
And when was the last time Joe Sixpack or Suzie Homemaker ever did any calculations like these?
Physics and engineering students might care about these things, but regular people don't.
Tesla is an American company, so they have to go by American terminology. "Wagon" is shorthand for "station wagon", which is passe in America unfortunately. "Estate" has no meaning in America as far as cars go; an "estate" is all your belongings when you die, or it's a big mansion a rich person lives in. And WTF is "shooting brake", some kind of in-joke?
No, it's because Mercedes is like GM over there, but without different "brands" (Chevy, Buick, Cadillac, GMC). Over here, we have GM selling both shitty little Aveos and high-end Cadillacs, and big GMC trucks (and previously giant Hummers, and Pontiac/Saturn 2-seaters, etc. before they downsized). The high-end Cadillac buyers aren't put off by the Aveos. It's the same over there, except it's all one brand, Mercedes. They make a whole range of vehicles. It's just that they don't sell that whole range over here, they only sell the luxury cars.
AWD, at least on typical gas-powered cars, reduces fuel economy significantly, usually 2-3mpg. All that extra spinning mass and gearing takes energy to turn. Regular (manual) car transmissions already impose a ~15% hit on fuel economy; that's how much energy is lost just using some gears to multiply your torque (and decrease the output shaft rpm by a proportional amount). CV joints also impose a fuel-economy hit. Of course, it's pretty hard to drive without these, so we accept them, but putting more gearing and more shafts in (to support 4 driven wheels instead of 2) just uses up that much more energy.
I haven't seen the gullwings on this vehicle, but on other cars they usually use less parking space, not more. On the DeLorean, they were hinged in the middle of the roof, so when they opened up, they really didn't protrude much from the car, much less than a conventional door. It's really easy to get in and out of a DeLorean even in tight parking spaces. I doubt these are much different, otherwise they wouldn't be called "gull-wing" (when both doors are opened, they look like a gull, due to the hinges being in the middle of the roof, causing the door to have an "L" shape).
So what about filesystems? What are you going to do when your hard drive, with ext4-formatted filesystems, has a problem and you want to plug it into a system that only supports ext3? That's right, you can't. Of course, this isn't a problem now since ext4 is common, but it was when ext4 was brand-new, and it's probably still a problem if you try this with btrfs. Did you make the same complaint about ext4 (and ext3 before it), that you wouldn't be able to use it on older OS installations?