largely thanks to misplaced fears/NIMBY (not in my back yard) and so on.
True, but I think it has as much to do with corporate profiteering and bloodsucking stockholders than anything else. Upgrading a power grid (or a communications network, or a water distribution system, or any other public work) requires investment, forethought and planning. It also requires a degree of consideration for the general public which seems to be lacking in most corporate boardrooms and government at all levels.
Actually I can see a HUGE market for this in South Africa... with the power outages we had last year, this would be way better than having a generator running. Less noise and air pollution.... where do I sign up?
I agree. My girlfriend is North African, and her family has precisely the same problem. They have a big diesel they run when they need power and the mains have been shut off, but as you say that has it's own issues. We've discussed putting in some solar panels and a battery bank at some point, so yes there are certainly places where this would be extremely valuable.
Is the separate float switch for a second pump? I seem to remember the pumps themselves are not so expensive (compared to the batteries and rest of the setup). If the second float for the battery activation is on a second pump then it also helps if A) water is comming in fast enough to overwhelm the first pump (shouldn't happen generally anyway) and B) if the first pump fails
Of course, if you lose a pump AND have more water comming in than one can handle, then, your pretty screwed anyway.
Yes, a second pump. It's an independent backup system in case either line power or the primary pump fails. Not infallible, but a lot better than depending upon a single pump. I did this after a power failure a few years ago almost left me with a basement full of water. Naturally, after spending all that time and energy I've never had to use it. Still, every so often I test it, and occasionally swap the power cables to the pumps to even out the wear and tear.
I looked into those 12-volt "Ace in the Hole" type systems and wasn't very impressed, and given that the second pump only ran about $80 and I got the rest of the stuff from Ebay for very reasonable prices I figured I'd do myself one better.
This is just hype. I for one will not be buying the $150k batteries that need special zoning permissions and need to be replaced every 3 years.
Cost is around $50K a year? That wouldn't make economical sense for anyone. Is there anyone here who shells out $50k a year to their electric company? Didn't think so.
Well, if the things had a decent service life (15-20 years, say) and could be installed as part of the purchase price of a new home, and provided sufficient economic benefits to be worth the investment, I could see it happening. Maybe. But a pack with a 3-5 year lifetime is not going to cut the mustard. As I mentioned above, I have a 105AH Hawker AGM lead-acid gas-recombinant battery that runs my sump pump. Supposedly rated for 15 years service life, and banks of these things are used in load-leveling applications in large buildings. I once figured out how many of them it would take to run my house for a week, and frankly it was too many. So you'd need something more energy-dense for a whole-house application, but that's still a lot of energy to be packing away in an uncontrolled environment like a home.
If you can charge the thing during off-peak hours, then run your house off the battery during peek hours, that's a fairly obvious "cost saving measure".
You're right, of course, but the power companies will find a way to take those savings away from you if this becomes popular, you know that. Well, at least the one in my State certainly would, that is, if they didn't get a law passed to make home power storage flat-out illegal. Wouldn't put that past them either. They're bloodsuckers: for example, manufacturers that try to set up self-generating facilities to save money generally find themselves in court. Power companies are like record companies: they don't want anything to interfere with the way they distribute their wares, even if those changes might prove highly beneficial and profitable. Excessively conservative, I guess you could say.
Of course, if you can save $1000 over two years but the battery runs you over $10000, it's not ready for prime time.
No argument there. I wouldn't buy into this just for the express purpose of lowering your electric bill. Really it's more for peace of mind, I suppose.
Well, it seems the only real benefit would be the ability to buy power when it's cheaper, but you know that if this kind of residential load-leveling becomes popular the power companies will adjust pricing to suit. Now, if battery-powered homes did reach significant numbers, it could really help the power companies keep consumption closer to base-load (and avoid lighting up expensive natural gas power plants) during periods of heavy demand. You know, like a hot summer day when everyone has their air-conditioning on. But for the individual homeowner, it really does seem like overkill. If our power becomes so erratic that these things actually start to make sense, I'm going to say we've a lot more serious issues to deal with.
So far as flashing clocks go... all of mine take a 9V battery (or a couple of AAs) that will keep the clock chips alive for a day or two if the power goes off. No need for a basement full of lithium batteries! Besides, at least where I live I, I think the last power outage I had was about four years ago. Happened when the temperature was -15 outside and it got pretty damn cold in here before the power came back on, I will say that. Lucky I didn't freeze my pipes.
Dude, most hybrids out there use NiMH batteries. Sorry to give you cognitive dissonance.
And why would that be? Hybrid makers would like to use the lightest, most energy-dense batteries they can to increase range, and if they're not using lithium-ions I'm sure there's a pretty good reason. Stability is probably one of them. In any event, if you crush a large battery (say, in an accident) what do you think is going to happen, regardless of the chemical system?
I am interested in your sump pump backup. I am looking for a solution. How long does it last? Where did you get the battery? Any info appreciated.
I got the battery itself (a Hawker 6FV11) off of EBay. Got lucky too, it was brand new in-the-box. I also picked up a 2.4Kw inverter from EBay, and a 30 amp continuous charger. I actually have two separate pumps in my sump. One of them runs from the mains, the other (with a separate float switch set a few inches higher) from the inverter. Works well, and while I've never had to run the battery all the way down, in my installation I think it would run for several days to a week, depending of course upon how much water is coming in.
I don't trust lithium-ion technology enough to want something with that much capacity in my basement. Wouldn't want my house to look like this
I have a thousand watt-hour battery that runs my sump pum during a power failure, but it's lead-acid. They've been around for a loooong time and are pretty damn stable (even so, this one is in a concrete-walled sump room.) Lithium-ions have a ways to go before they can be considered as trustworthy, and their higher energy density just makes them that much more dangerous during a catastrophic failure. Yet another reason why I'd never buy a hybrid vehicle. The idea of sitting atop a massive lithium-ion battery pack makes me far more nervous than I've ever been about a tank of gasoline.
If i want my car to have a Wifi AP I will throw my own wifi equipment in the back
Not much equipment needed. Personally, I just take my rooted G1 running Cyanogenmod and run any of a number of WAP apps. For that matter, the Cyanogenmod firmware has USB tethering built-in.
Not much of a case. Like I said before, if you don't want something on the Internet don't put it there in the first place. Google does honor the Robot Exclusion Protocol, so legitimate content owners do have control over what specific parts of their sites Google will spider. I don't understand why you feel that Google (or any other search engine for that matter) should be responsible for third parties posting unauthorized content. Let the copyright holders go after those individuals or companies that are truly infringing their distribution rights. Again, that's both expensive as well as futile (as the RIAA's failure of a litigation campaign has clearly demonstrated), so rightsholders have decided that it's more efficient to tear down the search engine business than it is to police their own rights under the law. And, if they can't destroy that business (thereby screwing us all over) they'll try to buy legislation that will force Internet service providers and service organizations like Google copyright police. That's the way these people operate. I'm sure you know that, and if you think that's a good idea... well.
So, when it comes to search engines facilitating copyright infringement, I say: tough. And I say that as a software developer who has suffered infringement over the years: I'm willing to look at the bigger picture. That is, modern Internet-based technologies offer tremendous benefits to society, and if that means that rightsholders have to deal with some infringement, well, that's just too bad. This isn't only about their rights, you know. Besides, when you get right down to it, copyright is a perverted, twisted vision of its true self, and no longer deserves the respect that it once had. Fact is, copyright owners already have far too much power and under no circumstances should be granted even more. Heck, if anything, high-powered search engines are evening the score a little, considering how much of the public domain has been stolen by corporations and their purchased law.
You see, copyright was meant to benefit everyone, every last one of us. Today, the power of copyright has been conscripted by a few who have, by unethical if not outright criminal means, acquired rights to creative works that they could never have produced themselves, not in a million years. Furthermore, in the United States and a number of other countries, these same forces have succeeded in extending the lifetime of copyrights well beyond the point where they offer any benefit to society. In the U.S., at least, the intent of copyright was to enrich the public domain, not to forever lock creative works into a private domain whose only purpose is to enrich a small number of megalomaniacs.
Consequently, if Google and other companies help us to take back a little of what was stolen from us, I say "more power to 'em."
I don't know about you guys, but if they decided to shut down my account it would be pretty devastating - I backup a lot of information and important e-mails only on gmail.
Well, that's your problem right there. No online service should be treated as a backup system, nor should you allow yourself to become totally dependent upon it. Period. Store your stuff on your own equipment, and burn it to a disc now and then if it's that important. I don't trust Google or any other corporation that offers free services to be there tomorrow: remember, anything free is worth exactly what you paid for it. Take steps to preserve your data: that's your responsibility, not Google's.
Stop buying networking hardware from China, and build (or re-build) domestic suppliers of such equipment. That applies to any nation that wants to maintain security: China has been abusing its position as a dominant hardware supplier for some time now. You can have all the network security in place that money can buy, but if the Internet-facing defenses have been compromised from the manufacturer you're pretty much screwed. Too much untrustworthy modified firmware has been coming out of China lately for me to place any faith in it. Well, all right... I suppose that if the boards are made in China but a domestic vendor supplies the firmware locally it would be okay... but that's not how it usually works.
Now, some of you may think that I'm picking on Chinese vendors... and I am, but the criticism is well-deserved in this case. Not that I believe the individual manufacturers are doing this of their own accord, necessarily. But there's a lot of intrusion attempts coming out of that country, and you can bet the people behind it look at selling compromised hardware to other countries as a legitimate tool. How many of those attempts are successful because a firewall or router has hidden code in it I suppose we'll never know.
The story isn't entirely clear, but it does say "the technique uses special ink made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires". Based on that I would guess the ink may be made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires.
That's definitely worth at least a +3 Funny... how the hell you got a +5 Insightful out of that is beyond me.
Still, "making available", even if only indirectly, has been criminalized in most jurisdictions, mostly due to US pressure via the WTO.
Which returns to the point I was trying to make: should the major governments of the world permit the corrupting influence of a few large corporations to limit or destroy one of the major technological advances of our time? I mean, Jesus H. Christ, the content cartels and their front organizations (RIAA, MPAA, CRIA, BREIN, etc.) make an incredible amount of high-decibel public noise about"theft" and "stealing" and "public responsibility", and then turn right around and buy Congressmen and have hideous laws like the DMCA passed. You can smell the hypocrisy a mile away, and given the way these people have operated over the past century or more, and the way they treat both artists and customers alike, I really don't think they deserve any more special treatment. They've already had more than their due.
Hell, it's been demonstrated the the media outfits actually draft most of those laws (probably because they don't trust Congress to get it right any more than we do.)
Fact is, Google and the other search engines have done more for the individual, and more for the economies of many, many nations than all the music and motion picture conglomerates combined. As a software engineer, I use search constantly, and in fact I could not do my job anywhere near as well if I didn't have such ready access to volumes of useful information. Sure, the entertainment industry (and let's face it, those are the people that have been subverting governments and legal systems worldwide in order to protect their ill-gotten gains) employ some people, but you know what? There are far more people employed in other industries, who shouldn't have their futures diminished in order to make a few few companies that much wealthier.
It's my country that's behind a lot of this (although the leaders of other nations most assuredly are letting their own people down as well), and as an American I can say this: the state of copyright today is a crock of shit, and the corruption has become so obvious that it makes me want to throw up.
Not just in London, I think you will find that this is the case everywhere in the world...
Basic human behavior, and it's hardly restricted to cellphone misuse behind the wheel. You see, everyone is somehow special and better able to handle a given situation than anyone else, and is therefore immune to consequence. That is, until such time as a consequence kills them dead, or if they're very lucky just scares the shit out of them. Cigarettes, drugs, risky sex, bad driving... most people don't learn to think until after their stupidity nearly kills them. I don't have a problem with that, particularly, unless their mental malfunction gets someone else killed. That's what makes using that damn cellphone on the road a bad thing.
Wise up people, you're no better at driving and texting than anyone else, and nobody is any good at it.
I think the best way to "think of the children" is to teach the children.
The problem is, everybody has their own ideas about what to teach the children, and the vast majority of those ideas will turn little Lisa into an imbecile, a sociopath, or a robot.
On the other hand, at least the robot can be programmed to drive safely.
Slashdot Mirror
largely thanks to misplaced fears/NIMBY (not in my back yard) and so on.
True, but I think it has as much to do with corporate profiteering and bloodsucking stockholders than anything else. Upgrading a power grid (or a communications network, or a water distribution system, or any other public work) requires investment, forethought and planning. It also requires a degree of consideration for the general public which seems to be lacking in most corporate boardrooms and government at all levels.
Actually I can see a HUGE market for this in South Africa ... with the power outages we had last year, this would be way better than having a generator running. Less noise and air pollution .... where do I sign up?
I agree. My girlfriend is North African, and her family has precisely the same problem. They have a big diesel they run when they need power and the mains have been shut off, but as you say that has it's own issues. We've discussed putting in some solar panels and a battery bank at some point, so yes there are certainly places where this would be extremely valuable.
Is the separate float switch for a second pump? I seem to remember the pumps themselves are not so expensive (compared to the batteries and rest of the setup). If the second float for the battery activation is on a second pump then it also helps if A) water is comming in fast enough to overwhelm the first pump (shouldn't happen generally anyway) and B) if the first pump fails
Of course, if you lose a pump AND have more water comming in than one can handle, then, your pretty screwed anyway.
Yes, a second pump. It's an independent backup system in case either line power or the primary pump fails. Not infallible, but a lot better than depending upon a single pump. I did this after a power failure a few years ago almost left me with a basement full of water. Naturally, after spending all that time and energy I've never had to use it. Still, every so often I test it, and occasionally swap the power cables to the pumps to even out the wear and tear.
I looked into those 12-volt "Ace in the Hole" type systems and wasn't very impressed, and given that the second pump only ran about $80 and I got the rest of the stuff from Ebay for very reasonable prices I figured I'd do myself one better.
This is just hype. I for one will not be buying the $150k batteries that need special zoning permissions and need to be replaced every 3 years.
Cost is around $50K a year? That wouldn't make economical sense for anyone. Is there anyone here who shells out $50k a year to their electric company? Didn't think so.
Well, if the things had a decent service life (15-20 years, say) and could be installed as part of the purchase price of a new home, and provided sufficient economic benefits to be worth the investment, I could see it happening. Maybe. But a pack with a 3-5 year lifetime is not going to cut the mustard. As I mentioned above, I have a 105AH Hawker AGM lead-acid gas-recombinant battery that runs my sump pump. Supposedly rated for 15 years service life, and banks of these things are used in load-leveling applications in large buildings. I once figured out how many of them it would take to run my house for a week, and frankly it was too many. So you'd need something more energy-dense for a whole-house application, but that's still a lot of energy to be packing away in an uncontrolled environment like a home.
If you can charge the thing during off-peak hours, then run your house off the battery during peek hours, that's a fairly obvious "cost saving measure".
You're right, of course, but the power companies will find a way to take those savings away from you if this becomes popular, you know that. Well, at least the one in my State certainly would, that is, if they didn't get a law passed to make home power storage flat-out illegal. Wouldn't put that past them either. They're bloodsuckers: for example, manufacturers that try to set up self-generating facilities to save money generally find themselves in court. Power companies are like record companies: they don't want anything to interfere with the way they distribute their wares, even if those changes might prove highly beneficial and profitable. Excessively conservative, I guess you could say.
Of course, if you can save $1000 over two years but the battery runs you over $10000, it's not ready for prime time.
No argument there. I wouldn't buy into this just for the express purpose of lowering your electric bill. Really it's more for peace of mind, I suppose.
Not to mention the size and cost of such a setup
Well, it seems the only real benefit would be the ability to buy power when it's cheaper, but you know that if this kind of residential load-leveling becomes popular the power companies will adjust pricing to suit. Now, if battery-powered homes did reach significant numbers, it could really help the power companies keep consumption closer to base-load (and avoid lighting up expensive natural gas power plants) during periods of heavy demand. You know, like a hot summer day when everyone has their air-conditioning on. But for the individual homeowner, it really does seem like overkill. If our power becomes so erratic that these things actually start to make sense, I'm going to say we've a lot more serious issues to deal with.
... all of mine take a 9V battery (or a couple of AAs) that will keep the clock chips alive for a day or two if the power goes off. No need for a basement full of lithium batteries! Besides, at least where I live I, I think the last power outage I had was about four years ago. Happened when the temperature was -15 outside and it got pretty damn cold in here before the power came back on, I will say that. Lucky I didn't freeze my pipes.
So far as flashing clocks go
Dude, most hybrids out there use NiMH batteries. Sorry to give you cognitive dissonance.
And why would that be? Hybrid makers would like to use the lightest, most energy-dense batteries they can to increase range, and if they're not using lithium-ions I'm sure there's a pretty good reason. Stability is probably one of them. In any event, if you crush a large battery (say, in an accident) what do you think is going to happen, regardless of the chemical system?
I am interested in your sump pump backup. I am looking for a solution. How long does it last? Where did you get the battery? Any info appreciated.
I got the battery itself (a Hawker 6FV11) off of EBay. Got lucky too, it was brand new in-the-box. I also picked up a 2.4Kw inverter from EBay, and a 30 amp continuous charger. I actually have two separate pumps in my sump. One of them runs from the mains, the other (with a separate float switch set a few inches higher) from the inverter. Works well, and while I've never had to run the battery all the way down, in my installation I think it would run for several days to a week, depending of course upon how much water is coming in.
I don't trust lithium-ion technology enough to want something with that much capacity in my basement. Wouldn't want my house to look like this
I have a thousand watt-hour battery that runs my sump pum during a power failure, but it's lead-acid. They've been around for a loooong time and are pretty damn stable (even so, this one is in a concrete-walled sump room.) Lithium-ions have a ways to go before they can be considered as trustworthy, and their higher energy density just makes them that much more dangerous during a catastrophic failure. Yet another reason why I'd never buy a hybrid vehicle. The idea of sitting atop a massive lithium-ion battery pack makes me far more nervous than I've ever been about a tank of gasoline.
aren't usually that good at expressing themself
Apparently.
Can we have anyone admit to being a fan of Bing here without being modded down
Nah ... that would be too much like admitting you have herpes in front of a live television audience.
You've obviously never owned a Ford. I'd be willing to bet current wireless standards will be around longer than most new Fords.
Modern Fords have higher initial quality ratings higher than Toyota's. Try to keep up with the times.
Factory Outlet Rolling Defects? Toy Autos?
If i want my car to have a Wifi AP I will throw my own wifi equipment in the back
Not much equipment needed. Personally, I just take my rooted G1 running Cyanogenmod and run any of a number of WAP apps. For that matter, the Cyanogenmod firmware has USB tethering built-in.
wow, maybe someone needs to program the nearest "AA" meeting location into the GPS of their Self-Driving Car and let it take them there.
Frankly, I think couple of brews are exactly what this guy needs.
Not much of a case. Like I said before, if you don't want something on the Internet don't put it there in the first place. Google does honor the Robot Exclusion Protocol, so legitimate content owners do have control over what specific parts of their sites Google will spider. I don't understand why you feel that Google (or any other search engine for that matter) should be responsible for third parties posting unauthorized content. Let the copyright holders go after those individuals or companies that are truly infringing their distribution rights. Again, that's both expensive as well as futile (as the RIAA's failure of a litigation campaign has clearly demonstrated), so rightsholders have decided that it's more efficient to tear down the search engine business than it is to police their own rights under the law. And, if they can't destroy that business (thereby screwing us all over) they'll try to buy legislation that will force Internet service providers and service organizations like Google copyright police. That's the way these people operate. I'm sure you know that, and if you think that's a good idea ... well.
So, when it comes to search engines facilitating copyright infringement, I say: tough. And I say that as a software developer who has suffered infringement over the years: I'm willing to look at the bigger picture. That is, modern Internet-based technologies offer tremendous benefits to society, and if that means that rightsholders have to deal with some infringement, well, that's just too bad. This isn't only about their rights, you know. Besides, when you get right down to it, copyright is a perverted, twisted vision of its true self, and no longer deserves the respect that it once had. Fact is, copyright owners already have far too much power and under no circumstances should be granted even more. Heck, if anything, high-powered search engines are evening the score a little, considering how much of the public domain has been stolen by corporations and their purchased law.
You see, copyright was meant to benefit everyone, every last one of us. Today, the power of copyright has been conscripted by a few who have, by unethical if not outright criminal means, acquired rights to creative works that they could never have produced themselves, not in a million years. Furthermore, in the United States and a number of other countries, these same forces have succeeded in extending the lifetime of copyrights well beyond the point where they offer any benefit to society. In the U.S., at least, the intent of copyright was to enrich the public domain, not to forever lock creative works into a private domain whose only purpose is to enrich a small number of megalomaniacs.
Consequently, if Google and other companies help us to take back a little of what was stolen from us, I say "more power to 'em."
I don't know about you guys, but if they decided to shut down my account it would be pretty devastating - I backup a lot of information and important e-mails only on gmail.
Well, that's your problem right there. No online service should be treated as a backup system, nor should you allow yourself to become totally dependent upon it. Period. Store your stuff on your own equipment, and burn it to a disc now and then if it's that important. I don't trust Google or any other corporation that offers free services to be there tomorrow: remember, anything free is worth exactly what you paid for it. Take steps to preserve your data: that's your responsibility, not Google's.
Yea I am. Mostly because I'm not retarded enough to keep doing it when in a tense situation.
No, you're just more aware of your own human limitations ... but by your own admission you're not any more capable of simultaneous texting and driving.
Stop buying networking hardware from China, and build (or re-build) domestic suppliers of such equipment. That applies to any nation that wants to maintain security: China has been abusing its position as a dominant hardware supplier for some time now. You can have all the network security in place that money can buy, but if the Internet-facing defenses have been compromised from the manufacturer you're pretty much screwed. Too much untrustworthy modified firmware has been coming out of China lately for me to place any faith in it. Well, all right ... I suppose that if the boards are made in China but a domestic vendor supplies the firmware locally it would be okay ... but that's not how it usually works.
... and I am, but the criticism is well-deserved in this case. Not that I believe the individual manufacturers are doing this of their own accord, necessarily. But there's a lot of intrusion attempts coming out of that country, and you can bet the people behind it look at selling compromised hardware to other countries as a legitimate tool. How many of those attempts are successful because a firewall or router has hidden code in it I suppose we'll never know.
Now, some of you may think that I'm picking on Chinese vendors
So use it as carbon fiber to build the structure of the car.... Sound perfectly plausible already at that.
Sure, until you total your car and the shattered carbon fibers discharge all at once.
A tank full of gasoline is positively safe compared to that.
So, what exactly is needed not to guarantee the buggy whip manufacturers a job?
Cars, I'm guessing.
The story isn't entirely clear, but it does say "the technique uses special ink made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires". Based on that I would guess the ink may be made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires.
That's definitely worth at least a +3 Funny ... how the hell you got a +5 Insightful out of that is beyond me.
As the content is automatically copyrighted once posted, google is in fact displaying copyrighted material.
Which is not, at least under U.S. law, illegal.
Still, "making available", even if only indirectly, has been criminalized in most jurisdictions, mostly due to US pressure via the WTO.
Which returns to the point I was trying to make: should the major governments of the world permit the corrupting influence of a few large corporations to limit or destroy one of the major technological advances of our time? I mean, Jesus H. Christ, the content cartels and their front organizations (RIAA, MPAA, CRIA, BREIN, etc.) make an incredible amount of high-decibel public noise about"theft" and "stealing" and "public responsibility", and then turn right around and buy Congressmen and have hideous laws like the DMCA passed. You can smell the hypocrisy a mile away, and given the way these people have operated over the past century or more, and the way they treat both artists and customers alike, I really don't think they deserve any more special treatment. They've already had more than their due.
Hell, it's been demonstrated the the media outfits actually draft most of those laws (probably because they don't trust Congress to get it right any more than we do.)
Fact is, Google and the other search engines have done more for the individual, and more for the economies of many, many nations than all the music and motion picture conglomerates combined. As a software engineer, I use search constantly, and in fact I could not do my job anywhere near as well if I didn't have such ready access to volumes of useful information. Sure, the entertainment industry (and let's face it, those are the people that have been subverting governments and legal systems worldwide in order to protect their ill-gotten gains) employ some people, but you know what? There are far more people employed in other industries, who shouldn't have their futures diminished in order to make a few few companies that much wealthier.
It's my country that's behind a lot of this (although the leaders of other nations most assuredly are letting their own people down as well), and as an American I can say this: the state of copyright today is a crock of shit, and the corruption has become so obvious that it makes me want to throw up.
Not just in London, I think you will find that this is the case everywhere in the world...
Basic human behavior, and it's hardly restricted to cellphone misuse behind the wheel. You see, everyone is somehow special and better able to handle a given situation than anyone else, and is therefore immune to consequence. That is, until such time as a consequence kills them dead, or if they're very lucky just scares the shit out of them. Cigarettes, drugs, risky sex, bad driving ... most people don't learn to think until after their stupidity nearly kills them. I don't have a problem with that, particularly, unless their mental malfunction gets someone else killed. That's what makes using that damn cellphone on the road a bad thing.
Wise up people, you're no better at driving and texting than anyone else, and nobody is any good at it.
I think the best way to "think of the children" is to teach the children.
The problem is, everybody has their own ideas about what to teach the children, and the vast majority of those ideas will turn little Lisa into an imbecile, a sociopath, or a robot.
On the other hand, at least the robot can be programmed to drive safely.