"Tesla could be profitable any time they want to, but if they did so they would remain a niche market and could never produce a car like the model 3"
The thing to bear in mind is that carmakers traditionally make far more money selling car parts (or in Ford's case, finance deals) than cars.
Tesla's focus isn't cars or car parts. It's batteries - and not just in Teslas, or even in cars.
The objective is to produce a large enough market for large batteries for economies of scale to kick in enough to lower prices and spur demand. Bear in mind that patents have been used for the last 20 years to keep automotive traction batteries uncompetitive and some of those patents recently expired.
"Tesla's system is designed to simply relinquish control back to the driver the moment it can't handle what's happening."
All the systems I've seen in operation so far (including the rudimentary stuff on my 12 year old Nissan) give several seconds of warnings before handing control back or throwing out the anchors.
The reality is that in any situation where the car can't cope, 1: A human is unlikely to cope much better (most drivers don't look beyond the end of their nose. Looking 12-15 seconds ahead is an alien concept to them. Thinking 2-3 minutes ahead is unheard of.)
2: The situation was almost invariably caused by a human driver doing something spectacularly stupid and usually highly illegal.
" that's why I think there should be no steering wheel control features unless the car was actually self-driving "
ITYM s/unless/while/
The Delphi test vehicle pulls the steering wheel forward a couple of inches when running autonomously. If you grab the wheel it hands control back and moves the thing back to manual position as confirmation.
This is still developing technology. Tesla is well positioned to deal with this via software changes vs traditional carmakers who love to charge silly money for such things. I'm surprised that slagging matches haven't been a regular feature already.
Indeed. but it's been pointed out a few times that the rise in reported drone near misses at Heathrow is only matched by the fall in bird near misses at Heathrow.
It'd pretty much take an overnight cessation of all fossil fuels to keep it at 2C and that's not going to happen.
Slashdotters might like to look up anoxic events and wonder if there will be enough of us left to consider global warming issues when sea levels start rising enough that people notice.
The _only_ way to get enough cheap energy to replace fossil fuels is nuclear energy. Wind and solar might just be able to match correct electrical demands but that''s less than half of total carbon generation. Moving to electric heating and transportation has to be taken into account.
"Geothermal energy - the only "clean" energy source which could potentially have replaced base load power plants "
Bunkum.
Rocks are amazingly poor heat conductors. Geothermal energy plants start out with high production and then taper off to uneconomic with a few tiny exceptions such as Iceland, which has the advantage of being on top of a mantle plume that's constantly bringing new heat near the surface.
"serious quakes can occur on other faults -- probably including some fault zones that we aren't currently aware of."
This is exactly what happened in New Zealand. The fault that killed Christchurch was completely unknown before it popped and then unzipped on its way to the coast and out to sea over the next few months, despite the kiwis spending a lot of time and effort trying to map this kind of thing in their very shaky country.
"They should be able to predict when earthquakes will occur well, well in advance, like 100 years."
OK.
"There will be a very large earthquake centred in the middle of North America in the next 50-100 years - and much of the country is not prepared for it"
New Madrid is geologically as regular as clockwork, but in human terms that translates to plus or minus 100 years or more.
Predicting the long-term risk if quakes is relatively straightforward.
It's predicting the one that happens next week which is hard. Even if we know roughly when and where the next one might occur (the anatolian fault being one example where it's predictable), that "when" has enough of a margin of error that we can't preemptievly evacuate an area. People get pissed off and move back after a few days, let alone a few years.
As for why cities get built on faults: Every major historical habitation is built close to waterways and a salt lick. These tend to happen to be around around faults. Whilst sometimes people abandon their homes for safer locales it usually takes a lot of persuasion (Wars, the constant ongoing earthquakes in Christchurch, the repeated flooding events that will happen in New Orleans)
Mainly because it's the only way of ensuring you and your family get fed.
It's been said that most of the battalions facing SK have no bullets for their weapons because in the event of hostilities commencing the first shots fired would be through the head of the local commanding officers.
Remember what happened in Iraq in 1991. At least 1/4 of the army simply dropped their weapons and tried to surrender as soon as the americans showed up. The Republican Guard was a different matter but a conscript army has no will to get itself killed and would quite likely see an invasion as an opportunity to save both themselves and their families.
"North Korea's posturing helps both South Korea and Japan cover up their own embarassing internal mistakes"
Of course, having a bogeyman to scare people with is highly effective at being able to keep them docile and not noticing their rights have been stripped away.
Iran was the bogeyman for a long time, which suited Iran's leaders just fine as they could use the west as their own bogeyman to scare their locals.
The best response to hysterical ranting isn't to up the military ante, but to point and laugh, whilst _quietly_ making sure you have a big enough baseball bat to ensure the bully can be effectively dealt with if/when he does turn into a raving psychopath. The power that FatboyKim has, is undermined if you can get the population to quietly ridicule him.
It's just unfortunate in this case that Russia is hellbent on keeping NK running. The chinese put up with the antics as it gives a buffer between them and the USA but it's clear they've run out of patience on a few occasions (power and oil exports to NK cut off for four months at one point in the recent past). The sad part is that the people who suffered most when this happened were the general population. The kleptocracy at the top will stop at nothing to maintain their lifestyle.
It's more likely that ISPs disconnecting customers without a court order would result in them paying shitloads of damages and legal fees.
When you're a monopoly provider the choices about who you _can't_ sell to are highly restricted.
In addition ISPs have been getting mightily sick of the porn trolls and they're taking the opportunities afforded by judges losing patience with said troglodytes to push back against uncompensated discovery demands.
"Private entities generally have the right to refuse service to anyone"
Most broadband providers in the USA are legislated local monopolies.
This gives them the power to abuse the market, as is seen pretty much everywhere in the USA but it also prevents them refusing service for all but the most serious issues.
"Not only can't the RIAA/MPAA afford to buy Comcast, Comcast could in fact afford to buy all of the RIAA and MPAA companies combined."
This has struck me on several occasions.
Should the RIAA/MPAA prove to be too much of a nuisance to large ISPs, the best defence might well be to start buying up companies and sacking people, quickly.
It's utterly mind-boggling that an industry with such a tiny market cap is able to dictate terms to governments and in trade deals in a way that is wildly disproportionate to their economic clout.
Of course the risk is that having bought up various *AA members, it might turn out to be a poison pill in a similar way to what has happened to Google since it bought Doubleclick - instead of Google stopping the bad practices, it has (eventually) become a larger version of Doubleclick (hence the comment about sacking people asap)
"Fission plants can meltdown because they are stocked with a decade's worth of fuel in the plant all at once"
No, it's because theyr'e designed in such a way that they _can_ melt down. Better designs exist - and have been tested in operation too, but civil systems chose to remain with dangerous water- or molten-metal- based systems.
"which means that criticality always needs to be controlled"
See above. The criticality issue comes down to needing to limit the temperature to prevent water boiling instantly (prompt criticality - that's what killed 3 guys in the 1950s) or the entire system boiling dry over time and then rising to the natural limiting temperature of fission reactions (about 1500C due to doppler effects) which results in the metal cladding of the fuel rods melting.
It's worth nothing that the interior of a fission fuel rod is over 1000C, despite the water it's immersed in only being 300-400C (and obviously under high pressure or else it'd boil - which adds the risk of steam explosions to deal with), thanks to the incredibly shitty thermal conductivity of the uranium oxide in the rod. Meltdowns usually occur long after the fission reactions have stopped - because you have to keep wicking that heat energy away for a long time as it finally reaches the outside of the rod.
The safety issues of water-cooled reactor systems are such that they should have been banned a long time ago - and whatever bozo thought that molten sodium made a good coolant should get to cleanup the Monju fast breeder reactor site without a hazmat suit.
There _are_ better designs - which don't need water cooling (and because water-cooled systems have to run at low thermal efficiency, such systems don't need the big heatsinks PWR systems need - aka rivers or oceans), they also can't melt down, or catch fire, or vent radioactive steam. The problem is that building a reactor takes a lot of money and as the old kludge design worked in 6-8MW nuclear submarines, it's "good enough" to scale up to 1500MW without seeking better solutions. Alvin Weinberger was abysmally treated and I hope his name is better remembered in 100 years than it is now.
In order to get too close to anything at Fukushima you'd have to be inside the _pressure vessel_, not just the reactor building.
Yes there are radionucleides in the environment, the hot ones are detectable from a safe distance and collectable (unlike the mercury products further down the coastline at Minamata Bay) but in general you'll face greater radiation exposure as a pack-a-day smoker.
It's worth looking for "the 10 most radioactive places on earth" on Youtube. It does a good job of pointing out the relative differences.
"I like the idea of a blinder that physically moves in front of the camera, but it'll probably add.1 mm to the thickness and that makes it a total no-go nowadays."
A decade ago, Logitech (among others) sold webcams with flip-down privacy covers. They flopped because noone bought them.
A decade ago, several laptop makers sold models with sliding covers on their webcams. They flopped because noone bought them.
The Dragon capsule is the most likely next american manned device. I expect that the ULA effort will fizzle or turn into such a blatant porkbarrel that it'll be killed.
"I had used Windows 3.x before, but it was complete shit and didn't give me the level of control, stability or compatibility that DOS did"
Which is why office staff I dealt with routinely dropped to DOS to run just about everything important.
They continued doing that even in W95 days (but not as much) - because it was FASTER than the gui.
It was only when MS made it harder to drop to a command shell _and_ made the common operations (bulk file moves in particular) faster that most stopped doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
"if Indian point had a fukishima style issue Wall street is unlivable, un workable."
More like TMI - partial meltdown and radioactive steam.
Fukushima was a clusterfuck on so many levels it isn't funny.
"Tesla could be profitable any time they want to, but if they did so they would remain a niche market and could never produce a car like the model 3"
The thing to bear in mind is that carmakers traditionally make far more money selling car parts (or in Ford's case, finance deals) than cars.
Tesla's focus isn't cars or car parts. It's batteries - and not just in Teslas, or even in cars.
The objective is to produce a large enough market for large batteries for economies of scale to kick in enough to lower prices and spur demand. Bear in mind that patents have been used for the last 20 years to keep automotive traction batteries uncompetitive and some of those patents recently expired.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"At the grid level, unless you have a very flat country, it makes more sense to use pumped hydro than batteries anyway."
There aren't that many locations suitable for pumped hydro, even in hilly/mountainous terrain.
"Tesla's system is designed to simply relinquish control back to the driver the moment it can't handle what's happening."
All the systems I've seen in operation so far (including the rudimentary stuff on my 12 year old Nissan) give several seconds of warnings before handing control back or throwing out the anchors.
The reality is that in any situation where the car can't cope,
1: A human is unlikely to cope much better (most drivers don't look beyond the end of their nose. Looking 12-15 seconds ahead is an alien concept to them. Thinking 2-3 minutes ahead is unheard of.)
2: The situation was almost invariably caused by a human driver doing something spectacularly stupid and usually highly illegal.
" that's why I think there should be no steering wheel control features unless the car was actually self-driving "
ITYM s/unless/while/
The Delphi test vehicle pulls the steering wheel forward a couple of inches when running autonomously. If you grab the wheel it hands control back and moves the thing back to manual position as confirmation.
This is still developing technology. Tesla is well positioned to deal with this via software changes vs traditional carmakers who love to charge silly money for such things. I'm surprised that slagging matches haven't been a regular feature already.
"They simply don't know yet."
Indeed. but it's been pointed out a few times that the rise in reported drone near misses at Heathrow is only matched by the fall in bird near misses at Heathrow.
2C is already a done deal.
It'd pretty much take an overnight cessation of all fossil fuels to keep it at 2C and that's not going to happen.
Slashdotters might like to look up anoxic events and wonder if there will be enough of us left to consider global warming issues when sea levels start rising enough that people notice.
The _only_ way to get enough cheap energy to replace fossil fuels is nuclear energy. Wind and solar might just be able to match correct electrical demands but that''s less than half of total carbon generation. Moving to electric heating and transportation has to be taken into account.
"Geothermal energy - the only "clean" energy source which could potentially have replaced base load power plants "
Bunkum.
Rocks are amazingly poor heat conductors. Geothermal energy plants start out with high production and then taper off to uneconomic with a few tiny exceptions such as Iceland, which has the advantage of being on top of a mantle plume that's constantly bringing new heat near the surface.
"serious quakes can occur on other faults -- probably including some fault zones that we aren't currently aware of."
This is exactly what happened in New Zealand. The fault that killed Christchurch was completely unknown before it popped and then unzipped on its way to the coast and out to sea over the next few months, despite the kiwis spending a lot of time and effort trying to map this kind of thing in their very shaky country.
"They should be able to predict when earthquakes will occur well, well in advance, like 100 years."
OK.
"There will be a very large earthquake centred in the middle of North America in the next 50-100 years - and much of the country is not prepared for it"
New Madrid is geologically as regular as clockwork, but in human terms that translates to plus or minus 100 years or more.
Predicting the long-term risk if quakes is relatively straightforward.
It's predicting the one that happens next week which is hard. Even if we know roughly when and where the next one might occur (the anatolian fault being one example where it's predictable), that "when" has enough of a margin of error that we can't preemptievly evacuate an area. People get pissed off and move back after a few days, let alone a few years.
As for why cities get built on faults: Every major historical habitation is built close to waterways and a salt lick. These tend to happen to be around around faults. Whilst sometimes people abandon their homes for safer locales it usually takes a lot of persuasion (Wars, the constant ongoing earthquakes in Christchurch, the repeated flooding events that will happen in New Orleans)
"N Korean military is huge"
Mainly because it's the only way of ensuring you and your family get fed.
It's been said that most of the battalions facing SK have no bullets for their weapons because in the event of hostilities commencing the first shots fired would be through the head of the local commanding officers.
Remember what happened in Iraq in 1991. At least 1/4 of the army simply dropped their weapons and tried to surrender as soon as the americans showed up. The Republican Guard was a different matter but a conscript army has no will to get itself killed and would quite likely see an invasion as an opportunity to save both themselves and their families.
"North Korea's posturing helps both South Korea and Japan cover up their own embarassing internal mistakes"
Of course, having a bogeyman to scare people with is highly effective at being able to keep them docile and not noticing their rights have been stripped away.
Iran was the bogeyman for a long time, which suited Iran's leaders just fine as they could use the west as their own bogeyman to scare their locals.
The best response to hysterical ranting isn't to up the military ante, but to point and laugh, whilst _quietly_ making sure you have a big enough baseball bat to ensure the bully can be effectively dealt with if/when he does turn into a raving psychopath. The power that FatboyKim has, is undermined if you can get the population to quietly ridicule him.
It's just unfortunate in this case that Russia is hellbent on keeping NK running. The chinese put up with the antics as it gives a buffer between them and the USA but it's clear they've run out of patience on a few occasions (power and oil exports to NK cut off for four months at one point in the recent past). The sad part is that the people who suffered most when this happened were the general population. The kleptocracy at the top will stop at nothing to maintain their lifestyle.
"Did you take a look at that fatso Kim lately?"
Of course. He eats peasants and their babies.
It's more likely that ISPs disconnecting customers without a court order would result in them paying shitloads of damages and legal fees.
When you're a monopoly provider the choices about who you _can't_ sell to are highly restricted.
In addition ISPs have been getting mightily sick of the porn trolls and they're taking the opportunities afforded by judges losing patience with said troglodytes to push back against uncompensated discovery demands.
"Private entities generally have the right to refuse service to anyone"
Most broadband providers in the USA are legislated local monopolies.
This gives them the power to abuse the market, as is seen pretty much everywhere in the USA but it also prevents them refusing service for all but the most serious issues.
"Not only can't the RIAA/MPAA afford to buy Comcast, Comcast could in fact afford to buy all of the RIAA and MPAA companies combined."
This has struck me on several occasions.
Should the RIAA/MPAA prove to be too much of a nuisance to large ISPs, the best defence might well be to start buying up companies and sacking people, quickly.
It's utterly mind-boggling that an industry with such a tiny market cap is able to dictate terms to governments and in trade deals in a way that is wildly disproportionate to their economic clout.
Of course the risk is that having bought up various *AA members, it might turn out to be a poison pill in a similar way to what has happened to Google since it bought Doubleclick - instead of Google stopping the bad practices, it has (eventually) become a larger version of Doubleclick (hence the comment about sacking people asap)
"Fission plants can meltdown because they are stocked with a decade's worth of fuel in the plant all at once"
No, it's because theyr'e designed in such a way that they _can_ melt down. Better designs exist - and have been tested in operation too, but civil systems chose to remain with dangerous water- or molten-metal- based systems.
"which means that criticality always needs to be controlled"
See above. The criticality issue comes down to needing to limit the temperature to prevent water boiling instantly (prompt criticality - that's what killed 3 guys in the 1950s) or the entire system boiling dry over time and then rising to the natural limiting temperature of fission reactions (about 1500C due to doppler effects) which results in the metal cladding of the fuel rods melting.
It's worth nothing that the interior of a fission fuel rod is over 1000C, despite the water it's immersed in only being 300-400C (and obviously under high pressure or else it'd boil - which adds the risk of steam explosions to deal with), thanks to the incredibly shitty thermal conductivity of the uranium oxide in the rod. Meltdowns usually occur long after the fission reactions have stopped - because you have to keep wicking that heat energy away for a long time as it finally reaches the outside of the rod.
The safety issues of water-cooled reactor systems are such that they should have been banned a long time ago - and whatever bozo thought that molten sodium made a good coolant should get to cleanup the Monju fast breeder reactor site without a hazmat suit.
There _are_ better designs - which don't need water cooling (and because water-cooled systems have to run at low thermal efficiency, such systems don't need the big heatsinks PWR systems need - aka rivers or oceans), they also can't melt down, or catch fire, or vent radioactive steam. The problem is that building a reactor takes a lot of money and as the old kludge design worked in 6-8MW nuclear submarines, it's "good enough" to scale up to 1500MW without seeking better solutions. Alvin Weinberger was abysmally treated and I hope his name is better remembered in 100 years than it is now.
In order to get too close to anything at Fukushima you'd have to be inside the _pressure vessel_, not just the reactor building.
Yes there are radionucleides in the environment, the hot ones are detectable from a safe distance and collectable (unlike the mercury products further down the coastline at Minamata Bay) but in general you'll face greater radiation exposure as a pack-a-day smoker.
It's worth looking for "the 10 most radioactive places on earth" on Youtube. It does a good job of pointing out the relative differences.
"I like the idea of a blinder that physically moves in front of the camera, but it'll probably add .1 mm to the thickness and that makes it a total no-go nowadays."
A decade ago, Logitech (among others) sold webcams with flip-down privacy covers. They flopped because noone bought them.
A decade ago, several laptop makers sold models with sliding covers on their webcams. They flopped because noone bought them.
Perhaps these ideas might return.
So what if it's old? It still works!
The Dragon capsule is the most likely next american manned device. I expect that the ULA effort will fizzle or turn into such a blatant porkbarrel that it'll be killed.
Observation from 25 years of network and WANs:
Your top 5% consumers this year are pushing about as many bits apiece as your average consumer will next year.
Use them as your canaries. If you can't cater to their loads then you're already on a path to pain and mass customer loss.
4: Hydro is a _large_ methane emitter. All that drowned vegetation sees to that.
"They have a lot of wind up there, especially off-shore."
There is about enough wind to replace current power generation.
Unfortunately there is not enough wind to replace moving away from oil/gas-fired heating systems and to cover more-electric transportation systems.
Do do that you'll need 8 times the existing generation capacity.
"I had used Windows 3.x before, but it was complete shit and didn't give me the level of control, stability or compatibility that DOS did"
Which is why office staff I dealt with routinely dropped to DOS to run just about everything important.
They continued doing that even in W95 days (but not as much) - because it was FASTER than the gui.
It was only when MS made it harder to drop to a command shell _and_ made the common operations (bulk file moves in particular) faster that most stopped doing it.