Same argument as saying you'll never see 120v on the wiring in houses because they use several kilovolts on the distribution outside between transformers. Complete and utter nonsense. Several houses share a transformer now, and in the future several outlets will share a USB power supply, and for the same reason, it will be cheaper and more efficient.
Sure you can't use the same cheap wire that you currently have from the outlet to your smartphone to run fifty meter wires in the wall, but that doesn't mean you can't wire it, you just have to rate the wires appropriately, and it will still come out orders of magnitude cheaper than the existing system for many reasons (single power supply instead of one at each outlet, lower voltage wires don't require the same level of certification to work on, or the same strict requirements for mounting/running, lower current capacities of these outlets mean lower gauge of wire, etc). Sure these won't run your toaster or hair dryer, but it won't be long before you'll see them pretty ubiquitously due to all their other advantages, and due to the fact that so many devices use USB as a standard power source regardless of their need for a data connection.
The ones powering our local phone exchange have been going strong for over 50 years. Lead acid batteries last far longer than lithium ion. There's a reason lead acid is still the go to for telcos.
And that's where the momentum part comes in. Once almost all devices use USB, it makes sense for those voltages to be distributed within a home. You'll start to see centralized power supplies and low voltage wiring in newer homes because it will be cheaper and it will be good enough.
We were never going to see an overnight adoption of a new power distribution model, anyone pushing for that is delusional. That's also why we'll never see the ideal model, because nobody can make the world change that way. But over time, changes do happen, and this one seems the most likely direction long term. If everything uses the same power supply anyway (USB) you might as well supply your power that way. Sure you started with bricks plugged in to the outlets, then we evolved to bricks built in to the outlets, then we'll evolve to more central bricks, and who knows where it will all lead. The key is that it's all small steps, and none of them require massive changes, it's just one more little thing each time.
Cheapest? You need to look around more! A stack of lead acid batteries is pennies on the dollar in comparison. And the only downside is weight, something that doesn't matter for stationary applications.
I drive an S. There is not yet a competing vehicle to the S. The 3 has a single competitor, the Bolt, but it's not a very strong competitor.
There are a bunch of other electrics, but it would be hard to call any of them competitors to any of Tesla's current offerings. That is quickly changing, but we're not there yet.
I'm not one of those idiots who think that "electric" is a category like "pickup truck", "sports car", or "suv" are categories. Vehicles that actually complete with each other are similar types of vehicles, not ones who happen to have a similar fuel type, nobody would be silly enough to suggest that a golf tdi was in the same category as an F350 just because they were both diesel, similarly a smart ed doesn't complete with a model x just because they're both electric. That's not to say you can ignore fuel type, but it's just one factor of many.
Realistically we'll do neither, we'll all move to some version of USB. I'm already seeing it built in to many wall outlets, and seeing many devices that use USB for power despite not using any form of data connection.
It may not be the ideal solution, but we rarely do what's ideal, instead we go where momentum takes us.
As for higher current devices, that's not really an issue as most of those devices need their own dedicated circuit by code anyway, so those specific devices can be higher voltage without affecting the other devices.
Tesla's energy solutions have never been about the best product for the best price, they've been about having the Tesla name on it. Tesla is a cult, like Mac, where the capabilities of the system are irrelevant, the price is irrelevant, but you have to have it. It works for them in the car space because there are no competitors, but in solar and batteries there are tons of competitors doing the same thing for a lot less money.
You must work where I do. We just introduced "agile" to our team, the immediate effects are: - no longer allowed to meet with stakeholders as needed, must wait for weekly "demo" - daily standup that just takes tons of time to say "no change from yesterday because I'm still not allowed to find out what the stakeholders want because it's not Tuesday yet" - our group is cross functional, so that means that the learning project manager can do development work right? - my agile group is only 3 hours a day, strictly scheduled, so I'm only allowed to work on that project for those 3 hours, and work on nothing else during that time, nevermind that my projects fluctuate daily in their requirements, and one day I might have 8 hours work for this project, and none for others, but tomorrow it could be the reverse, and with deadlines as tight as they are, I can't afford to twiddle my thumbs because the wrong project has work ready.
The main thing I'm finding is that "agile" is anything but. It's extremely inflexible, and is stifling the ability to both meet end user needs, and to get any actual work done.
And yet it got pulled over for doing 10 under the limit. And call me back when it can do more than just pull over. If a cop is standing under a red light waving the vehicle through the intersection what would it do? What about a prankster trying the same thing?
Thing is, current self driving cars aren't even better than the worst drivers on the road today. They can't handle rain, they can't handle a construction zone, they can't handle a cop directing traffic, and the list goes on and on and on.
Self driving cars are the future, I have no doubt of that at all. But it's a future that is decades away, not a year or two.
And yet as awful as human drivers are (and they are truly horrible) they are still orders of magnitude more capable than the best self driving tech currently in existence. I don't think most people realize just how far off a self driving car that can deal with all real world situations really is. They can't even handle a good rainstorm yet, let alone road construction, emergency vehicles, or really ANY unexpected situation.
You still seem to be under the ludicrous assumption that self-driving cars are going to happen in the near future. There is an exactly 0% chance of that. We are decades away from self-driving. Current technology can't handle even the most basic of driving tasks without a human driver.
No, the real reason this is a problem is because for some reason people get offended by certain arbitrary strings of characters. That's the real root of the problem.
For some reason there's great outrage if someone uses a slang word to describe sex, or genetalia, both of which are perfectly natural parts of life.
Or maybe he's trying to say that a word is just a word, and that we shouldn't spend so much time policing them as we could choose instead to just grow up and stop caring which combination of letters someone chose to put side by side.
Except, as we keep seeing, no insurance company will take that bet in any near future imaginable. Not until we know these cars can handle the most basic of driving tasks like rain and snow, construction zones, cops directing traffic, etc. Not a single one of which can be even remotely handled by any existing system. I do think we'll get there, but it is still a long way off.
Insurance companies are extremely risk adverse. Until self driving cars are proven safer in all conditions and over millions and millions of miles, the insurance for them is likely to be far higher than the insurance for me. And so far, this is simply not the case. Humans may be horrible drivers, but we're still way better than any autonomous system out there, and it's by orders of magnitude.
Ideal and realistic aren't always the same thing. It would be the ideal solution, it will also never happen. Any plan that requires redesigning the roads is a non starter as nobody is going to "fix" every back road in every country. Realistically suggestions like this are just an admission of how terribly far away we still are from actual self driving cars.
But it really is about consistency. In my city a solid green arrow means to turn when safe, and that opposing traffic also has a green light. A flashing green arrow however means that opposing traffic has a red light.
Meanwhile, in another nearby city solid green arrows mean that opposing traffic has a red light, and another city uses flashing green lights (no arrow) to indicate the same, whereas in my city a flashing green light indicates that the cross street has no traffic light at all.
And that's just the green lights! We can go on to signage, or Lane making as well, all of which are horribly inconsistent.
But riddle me this: I passed a sign on the highway recently that said "mandatory watercraft inspection station. All watercraft must report". First of all, would the self driving car recognize that sign? It was the same type of pick a letter billboard that community centres and churches use on their lawns. And if it did recognize it, what would it do? Does it know if is towing a boat? Or has a canoe on the roof? There are an almost unlimited number of edge cases in driving, and computers are horrible at them. Driver assistance tech is easy. Full self driving is not.
Any solution that requires fixing every imaginable roadway to make it compatible with self driving cars is a non starter. The cars have to deal with the roads as they are, because nobody is going to spend the money to "fix" every single back road in every single country in the world.
So in other words, it will be completely incapable of handling a change to the road that happened since it last drove there, or since they map was last updated. What would it do if there's construction? Or a cop directing traffic? Not a single self driving car yet can even begin to deal with either of those situations. For that matter, the existing ones can't even deal with heavy rain!
I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm actually a firm believer that we will get there. It's just that it's not 2-3 years out as so many companies want you to believe, it's more likely 20-30 years out. I just hope we get there before I get too old and senile to drive for myself.
I don't think there's any doubt that self driving vehicles are the future. The issue is that it's become abundantly clear that they are not the present.
People seem to think that self driving cars are almost here, only a couple of years out. The truth is that they are way further away than people want to believe. Driving is not an easy problem to solve, there are just too many edge cases. I am very much looking forward to self driving cars, and I really hope we manage to get there within the next 30 years or so when I expect I won't be able to drive myself any more. But realistically I think that 20-30 years is far more likely than 2-3.
If it was done "right" you wouldn't need to ask for an unlock code at all. Look at OnePlus for example. No unlock code required, you simply unlock the bootloader and root as desired.
Every manufacturer making you beg them for a code is simply trying to remind you who really owns the phone, and it's not you.
It's cute that you think Apple would allow their devices to be compatible with someone else's hardware....
Most likely, they will have a proprietary charging pad that authenticates with the phone before being allowed to be used. That pad will connect by lightning cable (or maybe even a whole new connector that doesn't exist yet just so you have to re-buy all your cables) to it's power source so as to also eliminate the possibility of non-apple cords being used.
You are correct, however I think it sets a precedent. And once a precedent is set, the fines tend to ratchet higher in the future as you can now argue that they knew better and decided to do it despite the fine.
Of course for this to work, you need a jurisdiction that actually has consumer protection laws, and not only do those not exist in North America, they're becoming rarer and rarer by the day in the rest of the world.
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Same argument as saying you'll never see 120v on the wiring in houses because they use several kilovolts on the distribution outside between transformers. Complete and utter nonsense. Several houses share a transformer now, and in the future several outlets will share a USB power supply, and for the same reason, it will be cheaper and more efficient.
Sure you can't use the same cheap wire that you currently have from the outlet to your smartphone to run fifty meter wires in the wall, but that doesn't mean you can't wire it, you just have to rate the wires appropriately, and it will still come out orders of magnitude cheaper than the existing system for many reasons (single power supply instead of one at each outlet, lower voltage wires don't require the same level of certification to work on, or the same strict requirements for mounting/running, lower current capacities of these outlets mean lower gauge of wire, etc). Sure these won't run your toaster or hair dryer, but it won't be long before you'll see them pretty ubiquitously due to all their other advantages, and due to the fact that so many devices use USB as a standard power source regardless of their need for a data connection.
The ones powering our local phone exchange have been going strong for over 50 years. Lead acid batteries last far longer than lithium ion. There's a reason lead acid is still the go to for telcos.
And that's where the momentum part comes in. Once almost all devices use USB, it makes sense for those voltages to be distributed within a home. You'll start to see centralized power supplies and low voltage wiring in newer homes because it will be cheaper and it will be good enough.
We were never going to see an overnight adoption of a new power distribution model, anyone pushing for that is delusional. That's also why we'll never see the ideal model, because nobody can make the world change that way. But over time, changes do happen, and this one seems the most likely direction long term. If everything uses the same power supply anyway (USB) you might as well supply your power that way. Sure you started with bricks plugged in to the outlets, then we evolved to bricks built in to the outlets, then we'll evolve to more central bricks, and who knows where it will all lead. The key is that it's all small steps, and none of them require massive changes, it's just one more little thing each time.
I assure you everything I say is the truth. I'm not trolling, though my company may be trolling all of us with their braindead implementation of it.
Cheapest? You need to look around more! A stack of lead acid batteries is pennies on the dollar in comparison. And the only downside is weight, something that doesn't matter for stationary applications.
I drive an S. There is not yet a competing vehicle to the S.
The 3 has a single competitor, the Bolt, but it's not a very strong competitor.
There are a bunch of other electrics, but it would be hard to call any of them competitors to any of Tesla's current offerings. That is quickly changing, but we're not there yet.
I'm not one of those idiots who think that "electric" is a category like "pickup truck", "sports car", or "suv" are categories. Vehicles that actually complete with each other are similar types of vehicles, not ones who happen to have a similar fuel type, nobody would be silly enough to suggest that a golf tdi was in the same category as an F350 just because they were both diesel, similarly a smart ed doesn't complete with a model x just because they're both electric. That's not to say you can ignore fuel type, but it's just one factor of many.
Realistically we'll do neither, we'll all move to some version of USB. I'm already seeing it built in to many wall outlets, and seeing many devices that use USB for power despite not using any form of data connection.
It may not be the ideal solution, but we rarely do what's ideal, instead we go where momentum takes us.
As for higher current devices, that's not really an issue as most of those devices need their own dedicated circuit by code anyway, so those specific devices can be higher voltage without affecting the other devices.
Tesla's energy solutions have never been about the best product for the best price, they've been about having the Tesla name on it. Tesla is a cult, like Mac, where the capabilities of the system are irrelevant, the price is irrelevant, but you have to have it. It works for them in the car space because there are no competitors, but in solar and batteries there are tons of competitors doing the same thing for a lot less money.
You must work where I do. We just introduced "agile" to our team, the immediate effects are:
- no longer allowed to meet with stakeholders as needed, must wait for weekly "demo"
- daily standup that just takes tons of time to say "no change from yesterday because I'm still not allowed to find out what the stakeholders want because it's not Tuesday yet"
- our group is cross functional, so that means that the learning project manager can do development work right?
- my agile group is only 3 hours a day, strictly scheduled, so I'm only allowed to work on that project for those 3 hours, and work on nothing else during that time, nevermind that my projects fluctuate daily in their requirements, and one day I might have 8 hours work for this project, and none for others, but tomorrow it could be the reverse, and with deadlines as tight as they are, I can't afford to twiddle my thumbs because the wrong project has work ready.
The main thing I'm finding is that "agile" is anything but. It's extremely inflexible, and is stifling the ability to both meet end user needs, and to get any actual work done.
And yet it got pulled over for doing 10 under the limit.
And call me back when it can do more than just pull over. If a cop is standing under a red light waving the vehicle through the intersection what would it do? What about a prankster trying the same thing?
Thing is, current self driving cars aren't even better than the worst drivers on the road today. They can't handle rain, they can't handle a construction zone, they can't handle a cop directing traffic, and the list goes on and on and on.
Self driving cars are the future, I have no doubt of that at all. But it's a future that is decades away, not a year or two.
And yet as awful as human drivers are (and they are truly horrible) they are still orders of magnitude more capable than the best self driving tech currently in existence. I don't think most people realize just how far off a self driving car that can deal with all real world situations really is. They can't even handle a good rainstorm yet, let alone road construction, emergency vehicles, or really ANY unexpected situation.
We'll get there. But not in this decade.
You still seem to be under the ludicrous assumption that self-driving cars are going to happen in the near future. There is an exactly 0% chance of that. We are decades away from self-driving. Current technology can't handle even the most basic of driving tasks without a human driver.
No, the real reason this is a problem is because for some reason people get offended by certain arbitrary strings of characters. That's the real root of the problem.
For some reason there's great outrage if someone uses a slang word to describe sex, or genetalia, both of which are perfectly natural parts of life.
Or maybe he's trying to say that a word is just a word, and that we shouldn't spend so much time policing them as we could choose instead to just grow up and stop caring which combination of letters someone chose to put side by side.
Except, as we keep seeing, no insurance company will take that bet in any near future imaginable. Not until we know these cars can handle the most basic of driving tasks like rain and snow, construction zones, cops directing traffic, etc. Not a single one of which can be even remotely handled by any existing system. I do think we'll get there, but it is still a long way off.
Insurance companies are extremely risk adverse. Until self driving cars are proven safer in all conditions and over millions and millions of miles, the insurance for them is likely to be far higher than the insurance for me. And so far, this is simply not the case. Humans may be horrible drivers, but we're still way better than any autonomous system out there, and it's by orders of magnitude.
Ideal and realistic aren't always the same thing. It would be the ideal solution, it will also never happen. Any plan that requires redesigning the roads is a non starter as nobody is going to "fix" every back road in every country. Realistically suggestions like this are just an admission of how terribly far away we still are from actual self driving cars.
But it really is about consistency. In my city a solid green arrow means to turn when safe, and that opposing traffic also has a green light. A flashing green arrow however means that opposing traffic has a red light.
Meanwhile, in another nearby city solid green arrows mean that opposing traffic has a red light, and another city uses flashing green lights (no arrow) to indicate the same, whereas in my city a flashing green light indicates that the cross street has no traffic light at all.
And that's just the green lights! We can go on to signage, or Lane making as well, all of which are horribly inconsistent.
But riddle me this: I passed a sign on the highway recently that said "mandatory watercraft inspection station. All watercraft must report". First of all, would the self driving car recognize that sign? It was the same type of pick a letter billboard that community centres and churches use on their lawns. And if it did recognize it, what would it do? Does it know if is towing a boat? Or has a canoe on the roof? There are an almost unlimited number of edge cases in driving, and computers are horrible at them. Driver assistance tech is easy. Full self driving is not.
Any solution that requires fixing every imaginable roadway to make it compatible with self driving cars is a non starter. The cars have to deal with the roads as they are, because nobody is going to spend the money to "fix" every single back road in every single country in the world.
So in other words, it will be completely incapable of handling a change to the road that happened since it last drove there, or since they map was last updated. What would it do if there's construction? Or a cop directing traffic? Not a single self driving car yet can even begin to deal with either of those situations. For that matter, the existing ones can't even deal with heavy rain!
I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm actually a firm believer that we will get there. It's just that it's not 2-3 years out as so many companies want you to believe, it's more likely 20-30 years out. I just hope we get there before I get too old and senile to drive for myself.
I don't think there's any doubt that self driving vehicles are the future. The issue is that it's become abundantly clear that they are not the present.
People seem to think that self driving cars are almost here, only a couple of years out. The truth is that they are way further away than people want to believe. Driving is not an easy problem to solve, there are just too many edge cases. I am very much looking forward to self driving cars, and I really hope we manage to get there within the next 30 years or so when I expect I won't be able to drive myself any more. But realistically I think that 20-30 years is far more likely than 2-3.
If it was done "right" you wouldn't need to ask for an unlock code at all. Look at OnePlus for example. No unlock code required, you simply unlock the bootloader and root as desired.
Every manufacturer making you beg them for a code is simply trying to remind you who really owns the phone, and it's not you.
It's cute that you think Apple would allow their devices to be compatible with someone else's hardware....
Most likely, they will have a proprietary charging pad that authenticates with the phone before being allowed to be used. That pad will connect by lightning cable (or maybe even a whole new connector that doesn't exist yet just so you have to re-buy all your cables) to it's power source so as to also eliminate the possibility of non-apple cords being used.
You are correct, however I think it sets a precedent. And once a precedent is set, the fines tend to ratchet higher in the future as you can now argue that they knew better and decided to do it despite the fine.
Of course for this to work, you need a jurisdiction that actually has consumer protection laws, and not only do those not exist in North America, they're becoming rarer and rarer by the day in the rest of the world.
See, the problem is that you're conflating what people "feel" with reality.
Many people do lots of things that make them less safe, but FEEL more safe. This is but one example.