Drive by wire throttle (if done correctly) should provide several benefits. First off if your driving a car with Fuel injection + Cruise control + electronic shift control automatic. You already have a software + stepper motor that can apply the throttle. Your car must read a sensor and decide what fuel to inject. Your car needs to know your throttle position to shift. The ability to remove a mechanical cable to the pedal, second cable to the cruise control stepper motor, several springs and mechanical latch to operate from either cable, without adding anything to replace it (ideally you would add a second or third sensor to have a redundant fault tolerant pedal assembly that will warm you to replace it when any redundancy fails. and a limp home mode.) Does make your car better (baring a series of mistakes like Toyota had.) Also the main advantage is that it can provide a more efficient throttle application, and be able to do smoother shifting, without misfiring the engine wasting gas, or running lean, that is required without direct ECM throttle control.
Now if your getting a simple car with manual transmission, no cruise control... I do think that is the safer way to go. But that is not a common configuration in the USA.
Your correct, the old joke about the old pickups with metal dashes (like the 1970 C20 I own) was, wipe the blood off from the previous owner and sell it to the next. It is a more a question of which costs more to fix, and which is more valuable the person or the car. Had your old Buick ran into a old Buick in the exact same conditions, the outcome would easily have been that both cars would have been destroyed, and both drivers in the hospital for weeks. The fact that a new car ran into your old car, and everything was fine but the old car, doesn't convince me that the new car wasn't the savior.
Very little electric is used for fuel. Musks source on that was basid on pure wrong what ifs. Look at the cost to get a idea of the true waste, since the cost per btu of fuel is 1/5 that of electric, unless processing plants operate at a loss... compare the cost of what crude is sold at to what fuel is sold at a gas station, you'll find gas infrustructue to be 70% efficient. More cost eficient than just the electric grid. Also since most electric is produced from petrolum, grids maintained from petro. Cooper produced using mostly fuel. Until cars can be charged largely without the grid, you'll have a hard time getting a good hybrid to be worse than a pure electric.
In general my opposition to tracking, isn't that they are tracking me. Like you I could care less. The concern about tracking is more about the tracking in mass for the wrong reason. The officer who is stalking a woman. Do they use this data to intimidate others into being a false witness, or use it to track who Michael Dell is dealing with to gain some insider trading knowledge. Are they tracking reporters, to track down a leak (like Snowden.) Putting too much data into one database without having solid controls on access is asking for trouble, however in this case it seams that has at least someone has put thought into it. But don't just say well "Stop traveling with active, transmitting 2-way radios" If this system was in place for the police surveillance, you can bet they would add such a transmitter to your car.
> If you ask for proof I give you the VA. I would be interested in what is wrong with the VA healthcare? Everyone I know loves it, Vet was helping me and broke his fingure, was from out of town, he was back in 1 hour after paying $10, when I broke my finger I was in the waiting room for 4 hours before seeing a Dr. Only complaint I have heard of, is getting disability pay from the VA, otherwise it is great, and the taxpayer cost per person seams better than private.
Until the last sentence I thought you were pro government. Similar with Social security, the program would be self sufficient and a great idea, other than the general deficit. The fact we spent the $1 trillion dollar surplus from SSN on a dumb war, and the bush tax cuts, it would be doing great on it's own.
>Why would you take a system that a vast majority of the population is satisfied with, massively increase the cost
What? who was happy with a system who's cost was sprialing up, while services provided were spiraling down? Causing 1/2 of all bankruptcies in the country? Only the insurance companies were happy with it.
I will just point out, it is more than just one number. It so happens that Sweden has the highest GDP government expenditure on education in the world. In the USA a doctor will likely run up a $200k in loans, similar doctor in Sweden will be 1/10 of that thanks to government $. That isn't in the per capita number above, but is a big impact. Doctors are not paid as much, yet they don't have to be.
never done a tax return? You have income, when you make enough you get taxed, the more income the more tax. ACA is not income, but when you make enough they threaten to tax you. Deductions, when you spend money on things the government approves of you pay less taxes. Save for retirement, give to a church, have/adopt children, or pay for health insurance, your taxes go down (or with the ACA, if you have to pay too much for care at your income, the government pays you.) ACA fits into the tax system, the same as any other tax. Now for political reasons Obama admin didn't want to call it a tax, but it is a tax, with a equal deduction if your a good citizen (in the eyes of the government.)
>you're better off just paying the fine Only if the entire family are smokers, or they are making a 6 figure salary. You can check it out at http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/ A (non smoking) family making 50k will pay a maximum of $4500 per year. Single people will be half that. those making half that amount will be capped at 3% of salary.
You didn't answer, what about retaining evidence so it isn't lost? With the current snoden leaks, it is obvious that our government can't be trusted. But if you were a judge a year ago, I doubt you could find legal justification to deny logging data that is searched only with judical oversight.
> Blanket surveillance of everyone seems to me to violate rules
I think that goes without saying. But if your holding the gavel, where do you draw the line? When they come to you and ask, hey, no one is keeping track of phone data long enough, can we just preserve that data, so it isn't lost before we catch the bad guy. Then they ask, remember that phone data, well we need to do the same with internet data, honest we won't look at it until we get a warrant. Oh, well we missed these people who got flight training were associating with known terrorists, can't we just keep the data anonymous and just let a computer algorithm look into raising flags. Well now we got these flags, and it's a hot lead, can't we chase this suspect when it's flagged, we'll explain it after words, to explain why....
You even spelled it correctly in your post, yet confused Austria with Australia. Austria has no desert, Kangaroos, but does seam well enough suited for solar. Although not too surprising for a American to not know Austria, I visited there for a day back in 1995, yet still looked it up on wikipedia:( I felt bad for forgetting I had even been there. (Especially since I wanted to move there so bad, because they had beer dispensing machines for the workplace lunch room, for people who drove mining equipment.)
IMO the difference between safety critical and business critical are not as great as you think. If you can make something with 99.999% up-time without a handled fault, it can be used for either application. Most of the current systems for cars don't seam to be designed not to fail, but to fail back to mechanical system. That sort of safety critical is probably less helpful for a autonomous vehicle, than the output of a company that makes system redundant enough to keep operating regardless. Obviously google is the one acquiring the needed data, so they will need to be involved. The Car manufactures are the ones with the ability to well manufacture, so (at least some) will be involved.
Lots of urban legends around electricity, I worked as a electrician in a plant while getting my EE, and heard all of those same stories. Fact is it takes very little current 30 ma I believe, to stop your heart. But normal body resistance requires 200 volts to produce that. If you ever get 200+ volts through your body your close to deadly. Lucky for you almost none of that went through your body or you would be missing parts. Problem with water, is it is the best solvent, it picks up most things it touches. So how conductive widly depends on the purity. And at higher voltages you'll reach the point where any electrolytes will line up and make it a excelent conductor. If you still have access to a megger you can see this easily. Put each electrode in water that's not pure, and a dozen volts, you'll get a open circuit. At 500 volts you could easily get under 1 ohm. I very briefly got ahold of 1 leg of 440 v while standing in storm water wearing rubber boots in a light rain. That 260 volts to ground from the back of my hand (jumped about 1") me only grounded via that storm water had me such that every muscle was so sore I could barely walk for days. Entire body sore for 2 weeks after. I couldn't imagine how bad you had to feal after your incident. Heck I got a nasty bite from 24 vdc, it was raining I was sweating, I touched my forearm to the chasis while disconecting a battery (done hundreds of times dry) it felt like a bee sting wet.
Ac vs dc has nothing to do with it. Voltage is key. The tesla batteries are 375 volts. What was that sub? Also the tesla motors are AC and probably higher than 375 volts. All of that said, all but that one batery was turned off and sealed from water, so water was the right thing to spray. Probably saved the other batteries from getting hot enough to fail.
I have wondered how to make borrowing/sharing more fluid. IE I need access to a truck a couple days a month. I need access to a 5 passenger vehicle 6 times a year or so. I need a daily driver for 20 miles each way trip. I want a camper 3-4 times a year. So I have a quad cab pickup that takes care of all these roles. Much cheaper than trying to maintain insurance, license, tires, etc for multiple vehicles. Difficult to share something like this because people all expect a different level of care, and you can't rent and expect to have it reliably have a working everything I need. IE above average battery for the camper, or above average tires for pulling a boat from a lake in marhc... But ideally with the right level of trust, I would be willing to have a complete inventory and state of everything I own in a databse ready to share with the community in exchange for access to the same. Save the neighbor I never met from driving to the store for a wheelbarrow, save me from having to buy a planer for that one project...
While Tesla has no dealers, they have show rooms. That takes care of half the equation, the whats it look, feel like. Ideally the rental/try before you buy/short term lease is the best next step. I would rather pay $50 to rent a car, for the weekend without pressure than pay thousands to have a person pressuring me to buy (wont be the exact car, but close enough.) Then closing the deal online vs a shake of the hand makes no difference to me. I would love to do that with a house as well (practically what I did do.) Research the houses, load them all in the GPS, go look at them. The last step would be the only change, instead of calling a relator, meating at the hose, filling in paper work, waiting days, then meet up a month later with lots of paperwork without time to comprehend. Been much cheaper, and better all around if I could have just click my offer, get the counter, click a couple times for that last step.
No it doesn't. I would reduce his article down to 2 exceptions. Feel free to talk to a officer about anything not worth hiring a lawyer over. It will be.much easier to talk the cop out of a ticket, than a judge on your own. My experience is almost all cops freely lie in court. They don't want to look bad for charging you, and are convinced they wouldn't write a ticket to a innocent person. So they will say anything to convict. Most people have little chance then. It is fine to talk about others actions (unless your trying to protect them.). But this one requires alertness, and attention that many don't have. You need to shutup if the cop is asking questions about you, then he is building a case for arresting you,not the other guy.
It isn't the same. I had a metal bar go through my gas tank, with 30 gallons in it (20 x the amount of energy stored in the tesla.) No fire, cost $100 in fuel and $150 for a new tank. My guess would be metal into battery, chance of fire 100%, odds of $10k+ repair 100%. Modern gas tank in car full puncture, chance of fire 2% chance of $10k+ repair less than 1%. Relative chance of death, unknown. Granted I hope the design is such that the bar through battery is much less likely, but the relatively few teslas on the road makes me concerned if Tesla missed some basic protection. My concern is not with the tech, mostly with this 1 implementation, but not enough info to judge.
Li-ion batteries contain no pure lithium, Li-ion doesn't react with water. Only reasons not to use water is because of potential voltages. The water could either conduct back to fire fighters, or as it gets contaminated cause more shorting internal and external to the battery.
Inkjet printing
" The charged droplets pass through an electrostatic field and are directed (deflected) by electrostatic deflection plates to print on the receptor material (substrate)"
If I recall correctly ink jet ink is required to be both conductive, and have magnetic properties. So it does seam like a capacitive sensor would be fully capable of reading a pattern printed by some inkjet printers. So that leaves the question of how sensitive is apples pattern matching software...
>My point was: that position is based on a lie, and maintaining that position makes them hypocrites.
Many of their positions are at odds, at how the SCOTUS has ruled in the past. Taking a position on what the constitution means, that differs with what the SCOTUS ruled, or on how meanings have changed in the last 250 years doesn't make it a "lie" or make them "hypocrites". And for the record I agree with your position on the second amendment, but I try to understand others positions and when I disagree with them to do so without resorting to name calling.
> World hunger would for a large part go away if 30 billion a year could be donated.
If only it was that simple. When you feed people, who (if a significant portion) only know how to produce food, you leave them with nothing much to do but have sex. Food is free, so they cannot afford to even try to produce food themselves. Then you have more people to feed (and keep warm/cold/whatever.) So if you pay $30 billion to feed the 862 million for free, then in 3 years you need to feed 1.5 Billion and need $60 billion...
I don't have a answer, but I understand why the Gates foundation decided to skip the feed the 3rd world problem, to work on the bigger problem of reducing diseases in the 3rd world. At least that doesn't take away the local jobs, making a dependent population first.
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Drive by wire throttle (if done correctly) should provide several benefits. First off if your driving a car with Fuel injection + Cruise control + electronic shift control automatic. You already have a software + stepper motor that can apply the throttle. Your car must read a sensor and decide what fuel to inject. Your car needs to know your throttle position to shift. The ability to remove a mechanical cable to the pedal, second cable to the cruise control stepper motor, several springs and mechanical latch to operate from either cable, without adding anything to replace it (ideally you would add a second or third sensor to have a redundant fault tolerant pedal assembly that will warm you to replace it when any redundancy fails. and a limp home mode.) Does make your car better (baring a series of mistakes like Toyota had.)
Also the main advantage is that it can provide a more efficient throttle application, and be able to do smoother shifting, without misfiring the engine wasting gas, or running lean, that is required without direct ECM throttle control.
Now if your getting a simple car with manual transmission, no cruise control... I do think that is the safer way to go. But that is not a common configuration in the USA.
Your correct, the old joke about the old pickups with metal dashes (like the 1970 C20 I own) was, wipe the blood off from the previous owner and sell it to the next.
It is a more a question of which costs more to fix, and which is more valuable the person or the car.
Had your old Buick ran into a old Buick in the exact same conditions, the outcome would easily have been that both cars would have been destroyed, and both drivers in the hospital for weeks. The fact that a new car ran into your old car, and everything was fine but the old car, doesn't convince me that the new car wasn't the savior.
Very little electric is used for fuel. Musks source on that was basid on pure wrong what ifs. Look at the cost to get a idea of the true waste, since the cost per btu of fuel is 1/5 that of electric, unless processing plants operate at a loss... compare the cost of what crude is sold at to what fuel is sold at a gas station, you'll find gas infrustructue to be 70% efficient. More cost eficient than just the electric grid. Also since most electric is produced from petrolum, grids maintained from petro. Cooper produced using mostly fuel. Until cars can be charged largely without the grid, you'll have a hard time getting a good hybrid to be worse than a pure electric.
In general my opposition to tracking, isn't that they are tracking me. Like you I could care less. The concern about tracking is more about the tracking in mass for the wrong reason. The officer who is stalking a woman. Do they use this data to intimidate others into being a false witness, or use it to track who Michael Dell is dealing with to gain some insider trading knowledge. Are they tracking reporters, to track down a leak (like Snowden.) Putting too much data into one database without having solid controls on access is asking for trouble, however in this case it seams that has at least someone has put thought into it. But don't just say well "Stop traveling with active, transmitting 2-way radios" If this system was in place for the police surveillance, you can bet they would add such a transmitter to your car.
> If you ask for proof I give you the VA.
I would be interested in what is wrong with the VA healthcare? Everyone I know loves it, Vet was helping me and broke his fingure, was from out of town, he was back in 1 hour after paying $10, when I broke my finger I was in the waiting room for 4 hours before seeing a Dr. Only complaint I have heard of, is getting disability pay from the VA, otherwise it is great, and the taxpayer cost per person seams better than private.
Until the last sentence I thought you were pro government. Similar with Social security, the program would be self sufficient and a great idea, other than the general deficit. The fact we spent the $1 trillion dollar surplus from SSN on a dumb war, and the bush tax cuts, it would be doing great on it's own.
>Why would you take a system that a vast majority of the population is satisfied with, massively increase the cost
What? who was happy with a system who's cost was sprialing up, while services provided were spiraling down? Causing 1/2 of all bankruptcies in the country? Only the insurance companies were happy with it.
I will just point out, it is more than just one number. It so happens that Sweden has the highest GDP government expenditure on education in the world. In the USA a doctor will likely run up a $200k in loans, similar doctor in Sweden will be 1/10 of that thanks to government $. That isn't in the per capita number above, but is a big impact. Doctors are not paid as much, yet they don't have to be.
never done a tax return? You have income, when you make enough you get taxed, the more income the more tax. ACA is not income, but when you make enough they threaten to tax you. Deductions, when you spend money on things the government approves of you pay less taxes. Save for retirement, give to a church, have/adopt children, or pay for health insurance, your taxes go down (or with the ACA, if you have to pay too much for care at your income, the government pays you.) ACA fits into the tax system, the same as any other tax. Now for political reasons Obama admin didn't want to call it a tax, but it is a tax, with a equal deduction if your a good citizen (in the eyes of the government.)
>you're better off just paying the fine
Only if the entire family are smokers, or they are making a 6 figure salary. You can check it out at http://kff.org/interactive/subsidy-calculator/
A (non smoking) family making 50k will pay a maximum of $4500 per year. Single people will be half that. those making half that amount will be capped at 3% of salary.
You didn't answer, what about retaining evidence so it isn't lost? With the current snoden leaks, it is obvious that our government can't be trusted. But if you were a judge a year ago, I doubt you could find legal justification to deny logging data that is searched only with judical oversight.
> Blanket surveillance of everyone seems to me to violate rules
I think that goes without saying.
But if your holding the gavel, where do you draw the line? When they come to you and ask, hey, no one is keeping track of phone data long enough, can we just preserve that data, so it isn't lost before we catch the bad guy.
Then they ask, remember that phone data, well we need to do the same with internet data, honest we won't look at it until we get a warrant.
Oh, well we missed these people who got flight training were associating with known terrorists, can't we just keep the data anonymous and just let a computer algorithm look into raising flags. Well now we got these flags, and it's a hot lead, can't we chase this suspect when it's flagged, we'll explain it after words, to explain why....
You even spelled it correctly in your post, yet confused Austria with Australia. Austria has no desert, Kangaroos, but does seam well enough suited for solar. Although not too surprising for a American to not know Austria, I visited there for a day back in 1995, yet still looked it up on wikipedia :( I felt bad for forgetting I had even been there. (Especially since I wanted to move there so bad, because they had beer dispensing machines for the workplace lunch room, for people who drove mining equipment.)
IMO the difference between safety critical and business critical are not as great as you think. If you can make something with 99.999% up-time without a handled fault, it can be used for either application. Most of the current systems for cars don't seam to be designed not to fail, but to fail back to mechanical system. That sort of safety critical is probably less helpful for a autonomous vehicle, than the output of a company that makes system redundant enough to keep operating regardless. Obviously google is the one acquiring the needed data, so they will need to be involved. The Car manufactures are the ones with the ability to well manufacture, so (at least some) will be involved.
Lots of urban legends around electricity, I worked as a electrician in a plant while getting my EE, and heard all of those same stories. Fact is it takes very little current 30 ma I believe, to stop your heart. But normal body resistance requires 200 volts to produce that. If you ever get 200+ volts through your body your close to deadly. Lucky for you almost none of that went through your body or you would be missing parts. Problem with water, is it is the best solvent, it picks up most things it touches. So how conductive widly depends on the purity. And at higher voltages you'll reach the point where any electrolytes will line up and make it a excelent conductor. If you still have access to a megger you can see this easily. Put each electrode in water that's not pure, and a dozen volts, you'll get a open circuit. At 500 volts you could easily get under 1 ohm. I very briefly got ahold of 1 leg of 440 v while standing in storm water wearing rubber boots in a light rain. That 260 volts to ground from the back of my hand (jumped about 1") me only grounded via that storm water had me such that every muscle was so sore I could barely walk for days. Entire body sore for 2 weeks after. I couldn't imagine how bad you had to feal after your incident. Heck I got a nasty bite from 24 vdc, it was raining I was sweating, I touched my forearm to the chasis while disconecting a battery (done hundreds of times dry) it felt like a bee sting wet.
Ac vs dc has nothing to do with it. Voltage is key. The tesla batteries are 375 volts. What was that sub? Also the tesla motors are AC and probably higher than 375 volts. All of that said, all but that one batery was turned off and sealed from water, so water was the right thing to spray. Probably saved the other batteries from getting hot enough to fail.
I have wondered how to make borrowing/sharing more fluid. IE I need access to a truck a couple days a month. I need access to a 5 passenger vehicle 6 times a year or so. I need a daily driver for 20 miles each way trip. I want a camper 3-4 times a year. So I have a quad cab pickup that takes care of all these roles. Much cheaper than trying to maintain insurance, license, tires, etc for multiple vehicles. Difficult to share something like this because people all expect a different level of care, and you can't rent and expect to have it reliably have a working everything I need. IE above average battery for the camper, or above average tires for pulling a boat from a lake in marhc... But ideally with the right level of trust, I would be willing to have a complete inventory and state of everything I own in a databse ready to share with the community in exchange for access to the same. Save the neighbor I never met from driving to the store for a wheelbarrow, save me from having to buy a planer for that one project...
While Tesla has no dealers, they have show rooms. That takes care of half the equation, the whats it look, feel like. Ideally the rental/try before you buy/short term lease is the best next step. I would rather pay $50 to rent a car, for the weekend without pressure than pay thousands to have a person pressuring me to buy (wont be the exact car, but close enough.) Then closing the deal online vs a shake of the hand makes no difference to me. I would love to do that with a house as well (practically what I did do.) Research the houses, load them all in the GPS, go look at them. The last step would be the only change, instead of calling a relator, meating at the hose, filling in paper work, waiting days, then meet up a month later with lots of paperwork without time to comprehend. Been much cheaper, and better all around if I could have just click my offer, get the counter, click a couple times for that last step.
And without a lawyer none of that matters. A very few judges will care about a tecnicality without a equal around who would judge them.
No it doesn't. I would reduce his article down to 2 exceptions. Feel free to talk to a officer about anything not worth hiring a lawyer over. It will be.much easier to talk the cop out of a ticket, than a judge on your own. My experience is almost all cops freely lie in court. They don't want to look bad for charging you, and are convinced they wouldn't write a ticket to a innocent person. So they will say anything to convict. Most people have little chance then.
It is fine to talk about others actions (unless your trying to protect them.). But this one requires alertness, and attention that many don't have. You need to shutup if the cop is asking questions about you, then he is building a case for arresting you,not the other guy.
It isn't the same. I had a metal bar go through my gas tank, with 30 gallons in it (20 x the amount of energy stored in the tesla.) No fire, cost $100 in fuel and $150 for a new tank. My guess would be metal into battery, chance of fire 100%, odds of $10k+ repair 100%. Modern gas tank in car full puncture, chance of fire 2% chance of $10k+ repair less than 1%. Relative chance of death, unknown. Granted I hope the design is such that the bar through battery is much less likely, but the relatively few teslas on the road makes me concerned if Tesla missed some basic protection. My concern is not with the tech, mostly with this 1 implementation, but not enough info to judge.
No lithium present, li-ion is to lithium as water is to hydrogen. Li- ion is not reactive to water.
Li-ion batteries contain no pure lithium, Li-ion doesn't react with water. Only reasons not to use water is because of potential voltages. The water could either conduct back to fire fighters, or as it gets contaminated cause more shorting internal and external to the battery.
Inkjet printing
" The charged droplets pass through an electrostatic field and are directed (deflected) by electrostatic deflection plates to print on the receptor material (substrate)"
If I recall correctly ink jet ink is required to be both conductive, and have magnetic properties. So it does seam like a capacitive sensor would be fully capable of reading a pattern printed by some inkjet printers. So that leaves the question of how sensitive is apples pattern matching software...
>My point was: that position is based on a lie, and maintaining that position makes them hypocrites.
Many of their positions are at odds, at how the SCOTUS has ruled in the past. Taking a position on what the constitution means, that differs with what the SCOTUS ruled, or on how meanings have changed in the last 250 years doesn't make it a "lie" or make them "hypocrites". And for the record I agree with your position on the second amendment, but I try to understand others positions and when I disagree with them to do so without resorting to name calling.
> World hunger would for a large part go away if 30 billion a year could be donated.
If only it was that simple. When you feed people, who (if a significant portion) only know how to produce food, you leave them with nothing much to do but have sex. Food is free, so they cannot afford to even try to produce food themselves. Then you have more people to feed (and keep warm/cold/whatever.) So if you pay $30 billion to feed the 862 million for free, then in 3 years you need to feed 1.5 Billion and need $60 billion...
I don't have a answer, but I understand why the Gates foundation decided to skip the feed the 3rd world problem, to work on the bigger problem of reducing diseases in the 3rd world. At least that doesn't take away the local jobs, making a dependent population first.