Modern gasoline engines running at their peak thermal efficiency points are at about 35%. Diesels are typically in the 40% range. But those thermal efficiency numbers are a bit tricky... it's not even theoretically possible to get any work out of an engine using a thermodynamic cycle that's 100% efficient - the ideal Carnot cycle would be on the order of 70-80% across the same temperature difference. In the real world, something on the order of 50% thermal efficiency is probably attainable. Right now, we're working to push Diesels towards 45%, and it's requiring things like waste heat recovery systems - running a bottoming cycle to recover some of the wasted exhaust energy. There are a variety of more advanced cycles and combustion modes being actively researched too.
Generally speaking, a gasoline engine's peak efficiency is achieved when it's wide-open and running at peak load. At other operating conditions, the efficiency is lower due to a variety of factors. One of the ways we're looking at improving low-load operation is by using what's called HCCI (homogeneous charge, compression ignition) combustion - like diesel, compression ignition is used, but like gasoline engines, the fuel and air are premixed. It sounds like that's what they're probably using here, with the supercritical injection being used to help enhance and control the ignition process (a big difficulty with HCCI).
I don't buy that they could increase the peak thermal efficiency by anywhere near 50%, or that they could increase the thermal efficiency at a given operating condition by that much through supercritical injection alone. If they're comparing HCCI to traditional stoichiometric SI combustion, though, it could get close to that at low-load points where the throttled SI engine is at its worst efficiency points. The supercritical injection isn't the direct cause of that gain, but an enabling technology to help facilitate HCCI operation. All else being equal (i.e. same combustion regimes, etc.), the injection technology could only have an impact on the fuel/air mixing and thus the combustion efficiency (i.e. how much of the fuel is burned completely), which is already well over 90%; there's just not much room for improvement there.
Even if it doesn't increase the peak thermal efficiency of the engine at all, though, it could make a significant difference in vehicle fuel economy by increasing the efficiency at low-load, off-peak conditions. Most of the FTP and NEDC drive cycles (US and Europe, respectively) are at low speed conditions, with quite a bit of idling and cruising, but very little hard acceleration. Increasing the low-load efficiency of the engine will have a disproportionate effect even if the peak efficiency remains unaffected.
Not sure what is considered 'super critical' but diesel fuel under 180 MPa/26,000 psi is pretty super critical to me.
"Supercritical" refers to pressures/temperatures beyond the critical point, in a regime where there aren't distinct liquid and gas phases for the fluid.
How many people were killed last year in aircraft accidents? Hundreds would be my guesstimate. How many in car accidents? Tens of thousands would be my guess.
The wiki reckons you are off by an order of magnitude. There's been over 40,000 auto deaths every year for the past decade.
... Off by an order of magnitude? His guess was right on the money for the US, though worldwide numbers there are on the order of a million per year. His guess on aircraft crash fatalities was probably a bit high for the US, though about right worldwide - hundreds up to around a thousand per year.
Apple has been traditionally hostile to rival browsers, with Mozilla claiming that Apple made it "too hard" for its rivals to develop a browser for the iPhone.
While I like and use Firefox on PCs, Mozilla hasn't been able to develop a decent mobile browser for Windows Mobile or any of the mobile other platforms that don't suffer from Apple's barriers to entry. I don't think their complaint really means much. If it were Opera - a company with good existing mobile products - saying this, it might actually mean something.
It will be interesting to see if Opera's able to get around the asinine restrictions Apple imposes on iPhone applications, though.
OK, so if a traditional battery lasts, on average, 5 years or so, and the exceptionally long-lived one in my car has made it a little over 8, let's be generous and assume a 10-year lifespan for this technology... then you have to scrap and replace the body of the car?
... plain and simple. Modern smartphones already barely last through the day when used for e-mail, calendar, web browsing, GPS, etc. Add in the vastly higher power usage of high CPU and GPU demands for "great" gaming, and you'd have to double the size of it to fit a big enough battery to make it through the day. You can make a great gaming device that's too big and clunky to fit in your pocket, or a great phone that has acceptable battery life but sucks at games. Try to put great gaming hardware in a sleek, slim phone, and you'll suck down the battery in a matter of minutes.
Horses made way for internal combustion engines, and ICEs will make way for drive-by-wire electric cars. Thank goodness for progress.
Electric cars were one of the competing technologies that ICEs beat out to begin with when they replaced horses. Battery storage still isn't anywhere close to the energy density of liquid hydrocarbon fuels over 100 years later. ICEs will be the dominant technology for a long time yet.
True, I haven't. And I don't need to. It's a "sporty" front-wheel-drive economy car. The last year of the "900 Turbo" (by that name) was 1998, and the Chevy Cavalier Z24 outperformed it both in 0-60 times and lateral acceleration (Cavalier: 7.9s, 0.8g; 900 Turbo: 8.5s, 0.79g). $25k vs $21k cars (at the time)... not too far out of the same price range, at least.
The newer 9-3s are slightly better, though also more expensive... the '08 9-3 Turbo X had the best numbers of any Saab I could find, and got a 6.0s 0-60, 0.83g on the skidpad, and a 14.8s 1/4-mile time... for around $35k new. Respectable numbers for a performance car in the mid-'80s, or for a sedan these days. But that's about $5k more than I paid for my '01 Mustang Cobra new (4.8s/13.8s/0.9g).
I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy driving your car, or that it might not even be more fun to drive than the Cavalier that outruns it, but it's not going to match up with Mustangs, Camaros, Corvettes, M3s, or even performance hatches like WRXs and Mazdaspeed 3s and the like. It's a sedan with slightly above-average power, not a sports car. It's probably a great, fun car... but with that being Saab's top-performing car, and matching up performance-wise with somewhat sporty economy cars from other companies, it just doesn't make me think of Saab as having a reputation for cars that are designed for "performance-oriented driving." Saabs have a reputation of being safe and comfortable and having quirky styling. The 900 Turbo might even be fun to drive; it just doesn't mean the company has built a reputation for making high-performance vehicles. There's nothing wrong with that.
FWIW, with my daily driver being an '01 Mustang Cobra, and having also driven other friends' M3s, C5 Corvettes, Camaros, other Mustangs, etc., my standard for "performance" may be a bit different than yours. Not trying to say your car isn't fun for you; enjoy it!
The communications protocol is mandated. A base set of codes (the majority of those you'll ever encounter) related to the emissions control system is mandated, with manufacturers able to add more codes of their own in another range as useful. Those codes are also public knowledge, though, even though they're not specified by the standard. Any OBD-II code reader can read them, and the vast majority have the meanings of all of 'em already programmed in. If not, you can Google it, and the information is out there.
But even aside from what is and isn't part of the OBD-II mandate, everything about auto repair is accessible. Just because you may not have purchased the tools to do a job doesn't mean they don't exist. You can go out and buy the factory service manual (exactly what the dealers get) for your car if you want. You can go buy the same tools the dealers use, on the open market, if for some reason you don't want aftermarket ones. As for paying a lot of money, a hundred bucks for a code scanner doesn't really seem extreme to me, but the issue isn't whether necessary tools are free, but whether service can only be done by the manufacturer, and that is not at all the case.
Nice car analogy, except that it's completely untrue, and wouldn't even be legal. There's no vehicle sold that can only be worked on by "authorized mechanics" and even the open protocol that's used to interact with the ECM to get diagnostic codes is mandated by law in the US. They couldn't lock it down if they wanted to. Aside from reprogramming a new odometer to have the correct mileage, there's nothing a Ford dealer could do to my car that I can't do at home in my own garage. And the tools to do that are available too; third-party shops have them, they're just too expensive for me.
See, it's like if Saab were to be sold, and an exotic car manufacturer saw opportunity where GM pillaged and neglected the company for 20 years, and bought the company seeing that the "quirky" nature of the car is that the design makes sense, since the ergonomics are designed around performance-oriented driving and safety, which makes them different.
I believe that's the first time I've seen Saab and "performance-oriented driving" mentioned in the same sentence. Saab makes ugly but safe and comfortable cars that will get you from A to B, but a renowned sports car manufacturer it is not.
So get a Windows Mobile based phone, throw SPB Mobile Shell on it to get rid of MS' non-finger-friendly UI, and be done with it. Just because Android might not offer a feature you want doesn't mean the competition doesn't.
The university system rewards publications, not teaching.
While it's true that the university system rewards effective research (grants even more so than publications, in technical fields at least), it doesn't follow that teaching is therefore not rewarded. The specific standards vary from one university to another, but generally both are significant factors both in being granted tenure and promotions. Among younger professors, there's certainly an emphasis on building their research programs and finding sources of funding... but even this isn't divorced from the educational purpose of the institution: it's central to the education of graduate students. In order to take on graduate students, a professor has to have an active research program to employ them and provide the framework for their graduate work.
And, at least at the university where I did my graduate work, I know that teaching is a real priority. Tenure has been denied to professors who had good research programs but horrid teaching assessments. My advisor was just promoted to "Curators Teaching Professor of Mechanical Engineering" - a significant promotion that is entirely based on educational merits. The teaching priority includes the teaching of upperclassmen and graduate students, not just massive gen-ed freshman lectures, and thus some success in research is necessary though not sufficient. The two aren't at odds with each other: they're complementary
I do recognize that not all universities, or all departments within universities, share exactly the same priorities. And there are certainly some lazy professors who slip through and manage to gain tenure (though not necessarily many promotions after that...). And the concern that some professors are not skilled as instructors is a valid one. Training as an instructor, on the other hand, is primarily provided through mentoring in the advisor/graduate student relationship - if the professor under whom you study is a good educator, you'll be able to learn from him how to become one yourself. This is perhaps unfortunate for students of less skilled instructors, but given the uselessness of 95% of the educational curriculum noted above, I'm not sure the mentoring approach isn't better nonetheless.
Computer aren't exactly a new-fangled technology, and most cars built after the 70's or so have had some form of by-wire throttle control (I'm speaking, of course, of electronically controlled anti-lock brake systems which, while not fully by-wire, include a by-wire system alongside the mechanical one).
Huh? ABS systems didn't come out nearly that early, have no interaction whatsoever with the throttle, and aren't even braking-by-wire: they can momentarily relieve the pressure on a brake line to prevent wheel lock-up, but they can't apply the brakes on their own (except in newer vehicles when combined with a traction control system, which can apply brakes and retard engine timing, etc. to arrest wheel spin). I agree that there's no need to be paranoid about computer controls, but where do you get the idea of ABS as by-wire throttle control?
If the fuel line is pinched, for example, flooring it would cause devastating detonation, EXCEPT in "by wire".
Sorry, but that's not true. It is true that in off-road race engines, where the mixture is usually somewhat fuel-rich, leaning it out will cause higher combustion temperatures, but those peak temperatures occur very close to the stoichiometric fuel/air ratio that all modern cars with three-way catalytic converters are designed to operate at. If you lean it out from there, you'll have a much more dilute mixture, which not only makes detonation much less likely to occur, but in that extreme, makes it less likely that the fuel will ignite at all. I did my dissertation research on highly dilute SI combustion, and even with a very advanced spark timing, the problems to be avoided are always misfires and incomplete combustion, not detonation.
Besides that, the ECU has full control of the ignition timing on new vehicles, and control of spark advance from the base timing even on older vehicles that still used distributors. By retarding the spark timing, knock can be easily avoided even under conditions much more favorable than the ultra-lean mixture that would result from WOT and a pinched fuel line.
I'm not suggesting that there are no benefits to drive-by-wire throttle control. There certainly are, especially in more technologically advanced engines like the direct injection turbocharged engines Ford's rolling out. But the situation you pose where a mechanical throttle would supposedly be disastrous goes completely against how combustion physics actually work.
Of Boeing's commercial planes, all the information I can find indicates that only the 777 and the upcoming 787 Dreamliner are fly-by-wire - while clearly they're moving in that direction, it's far from being only the 737 that's not. And even there, Boeing and Airbus have radically different philosophies about the implementation. Airbus imposes hard limits on what the pilot is allowed to do (potentially contributing to several crashes), while Boeing imposes soft limits/warnings, but allows the pilots to have ultimate control and override the computer when necessary.
It isn't really "simultaneous patents" which are the problem - you shouldn't *have* to patent your invention to avoid getting sued by someone who invented and patented theirs at the same time.
You don't have to patent it yourself if you want it to be available to everyone; it's sufficient to challenge his patent application and prove that you did it first. You only have to patent it yourself if you want the right to control whether others can use it. It's not the timing of the application that determines which inventor deserves the patent, but documentation of the timing. Now if it truly was simultaneous (or nearly so), an argument could be made that it shouldn't pass the non-obviousness test...
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Modern gasoline engines running at their peak thermal efficiency points are at about 35%. Diesels are typically in the 40% range. But those thermal efficiency numbers are a bit tricky ... it's not even theoretically possible to get any work out of an engine using a thermodynamic cycle that's 100% efficient - the ideal Carnot cycle would be on the order of 70-80% across the same temperature difference. In the real world, something on the order of 50% thermal efficiency is probably attainable. Right now, we're working to push Diesels towards 45%, and it's requiring things like waste heat recovery systems - running a bottoming cycle to recover some of the wasted exhaust energy. There are a variety of more advanced cycles and combustion modes being actively researched too.
Generally speaking, a gasoline engine's peak efficiency is achieved when it's wide-open and running at peak load. At other operating conditions, the efficiency is lower due to a variety of factors. One of the ways we're looking at improving low-load operation is by using what's called HCCI (homogeneous charge, compression ignition) combustion - like diesel, compression ignition is used, but like gasoline engines, the fuel and air are premixed. It sounds like that's what they're probably using here, with the supercritical injection being used to help enhance and control the ignition process (a big difficulty with HCCI).
I don't buy that they could increase the peak thermal efficiency by anywhere near 50%, or that they could increase the thermal efficiency at a given operating condition by that much through supercritical injection alone. If they're comparing HCCI to traditional stoichiometric SI combustion, though, it could get close to that at low-load points where the throttled SI engine is at its worst efficiency points. The supercritical injection isn't the direct cause of that gain, but an enabling technology to help facilitate HCCI operation. All else being equal (i.e. same combustion regimes, etc.), the injection technology could only have an impact on the fuel/air mixing and thus the combustion efficiency (i.e. how much of the fuel is burned completely), which is already well over 90%; there's just not much room for improvement there.
Even if it doesn't increase the peak thermal efficiency of the engine at all, though, it could make a significant difference in vehicle fuel economy by increasing the efficiency at low-load, off-peak conditions. Most of the FTP and NEDC drive cycles (US and Europe, respectively) are at low speed conditions, with quite a bit of idling and cruising, but very little hard acceleration. Increasing the low-load efficiency of the engine will have a disproportionate effect even if the peak efficiency remains unaffected.
Not sure what is considered 'super critical' but diesel fuel under 180 MPa/26,000 psi is pretty super critical to me.
"Supercritical" refers to pressures/temperatures beyond the critical point, in a regime where there aren't distinct liquid and gas phases for the fluid.
The wiki reckons you are off by an order of magnitude. There's been over 40,000 auto deaths every year for the past decade.
... Off by an order of magnitude? His guess was right on the money for the US, though worldwide numbers there are on the order of a million per year. His guess on aircraft crash fatalities was probably a bit high for the US, though about right worldwide - hundreds up to around a thousand per year.
Apple has been traditionally hostile to rival browsers, with Mozilla claiming that Apple made it "too hard" for its rivals to develop a browser for the iPhone.
While I like and use Firefox on PCs, Mozilla hasn't been able to develop a decent mobile browser for Windows Mobile or any of the mobile other platforms that don't suffer from Apple's barriers to entry. I don't think their complaint really means much. If it were Opera - a company with good existing mobile products - saying this, it might actually mean something.
It will be interesting to see if Opera's able to get around the asinine restrictions Apple imposes on iPhone applications, though.
OK, so if a traditional battery lasts, on average, 5 years or so, and the exceptionally long-lived one in my car has made it a little over 8, let's be generous and assume a 10-year lifespan for this technology ... then you have to scrap and replace the body of the car?
The alien shot; he just missed and hit the wall behind Han.
Don't laptops use the battery as a power filter for the mains also? Or has that gone by the wayside?
Laptops use an external DC power supply. The raw AC "mains" power never gets to the laptop itself ...
Because phones are for TALKING. :P
Yep, that explains why the iPhone and other "smart" phones that are heavy on either multimedia or PDA functions are complete flops. Wait ...
I'm going with the theory that people want more than 15 minutes of battery life.
... plain and simple. Modern smartphones already barely last through the day when used for e-mail, calendar, web browsing, GPS, etc. Add in the vastly higher power usage of high CPU and GPU demands for "great" gaming, and you'd have to double the size of it to fit a big enough battery to make it through the day. You can make a great gaming device that's too big and clunky to fit in your pocket, or a great phone that has acceptable battery life but sucks at games. Try to put great gaming hardware in a sleek, slim phone, and you'll suck down the battery in a matter of minutes.
Horses made way for internal combustion engines, and ICEs will make way for drive-by-wire electric cars. Thank goodness for progress.
Electric cars were one of the competing technologies that ICEs beat out to begin with when they replaced horses. Battery storage still isn't anywhere close to the energy density of liquid hydrocarbon fuels over 100 years later. ICEs will be the dominant technology for a long time yet.
True, I haven't. And I don't need to. It's a "sporty" front-wheel-drive economy car. The last year of the "900 Turbo" (by that name) was 1998, and the Chevy Cavalier Z24 outperformed it both in 0-60 times and lateral acceleration (Cavalier: 7.9s, 0.8g; 900 Turbo: 8.5s, 0.79g). $25k vs $21k cars (at the time) ... not too far out of the same price range, at least.
The newer 9-3s are slightly better, though also more expensive ... the '08 9-3 Turbo X had the best numbers of any Saab I could find, and got a 6.0s 0-60, 0.83g on the skidpad, and a 14.8s 1/4-mile time ... for around $35k new. Respectable numbers for a performance car in the mid-'80s, or for a sedan these days. But that's about $5k more than I paid for my '01 Mustang Cobra new (4.8s/13.8s/0.9g).
I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy driving your car, or that it might not even be more fun to drive than the Cavalier that outruns it, but it's not going to match up with Mustangs, Camaros, Corvettes, M3s, or even performance hatches like WRXs and Mazdaspeed 3s and the like. It's a sedan with slightly above-average power, not a sports car. It's probably a great, fun car ... but with that being Saab's top-performing car, and matching up performance-wise with somewhat sporty economy cars from other companies, it just doesn't make me think of Saab as having a reputation for cars that are designed for "performance-oriented driving." Saabs have a reputation of being safe and comfortable and having quirky styling. The 900 Turbo might even be fun to drive; it just doesn't mean the company has built a reputation for making high-performance vehicles. There's nothing wrong with that.
FWIW, with my daily driver being an '01 Mustang Cobra, and having also driven other friends' M3s, C5 Corvettes, Camaros, other Mustangs, etc., my standard for "performance" may be a bit different than yours. Not trying to say your car isn't fun for you; enjoy it!
The communications protocol is mandated. A base set of codes (the majority of those you'll ever encounter) related to the emissions control system is mandated, with manufacturers able to add more codes of their own in another range as useful. Those codes are also public knowledge, though, even though they're not specified by the standard. Any OBD-II code reader can read them, and the vast majority have the meanings of all of 'em already programmed in. If not, you can Google it, and the information is out there.
But even aside from what is and isn't part of the OBD-II mandate, everything about auto repair is accessible. Just because you may not have purchased the tools to do a job doesn't mean they don't exist. You can go out and buy the factory service manual (exactly what the dealers get) for your car if you want. You can go buy the same tools the dealers use, on the open market, if for some reason you don't want aftermarket ones. As for paying a lot of money, a hundred bucks for a code scanner doesn't really seem extreme to me, but the issue isn't whether necessary tools are free, but whether service can only be done by the manufacturer, and that is not at all the case.
Nice car analogy, except that it's completely untrue, and wouldn't even be legal. There's no vehicle sold that can only be worked on by "authorized mechanics" and even the open protocol that's used to interact with the ECM to get diagnostic codes is mandated by law in the US. They couldn't lock it down if they wanted to. Aside from reprogramming a new odometer to have the correct mileage, there's nothing a Ford dealer could do to my car that I can't do at home in my own garage. And the tools to do that are available too; third-party shops have them, they're just too expensive for me.
See, it's like if Saab were to be sold, and an exotic car manufacturer saw opportunity where GM pillaged and neglected the company for 20 years, and bought the company seeing that the "quirky" nature of the car is that the design makes sense, since the ergonomics are designed around performance-oriented driving and safety, which makes them different.
I believe that's the first time I've seen Saab and "performance-oriented driving" mentioned in the same sentence. Saab makes ugly but safe and comfortable cars that will get you from A to B, but a renowned sports car manufacturer it is not.
That could be a trademark issue, but not copyright. They're not at all the same thing.
Great, one less extension I have to install now! (Tabs Open Relative was usually the second thing I installed after Adblock Plus up til now).
Like District 9?
So get a Windows Mobile based phone, throw SPB Mobile Shell on it to get rid of MS' non-finger-friendly UI, and be done with it. Just because Android might not offer a feature you want doesn't mean the competition doesn't.
The university system rewards publications, not teaching.
While it's true that the university system rewards effective research (grants even more so than publications, in technical fields at least), it doesn't follow that teaching is therefore not rewarded. The specific standards vary from one university to another, but generally both are significant factors both in being granted tenure and promotions. Among younger professors, there's certainly an emphasis on building their research programs and finding sources of funding ... but even this isn't divorced from the educational purpose of the institution: it's central to the education of graduate students. In order to take on graduate students, a professor has to have an active research program to employ them and provide the framework for their graduate work.
And, at least at the university where I did my graduate work, I know that teaching is a real priority. Tenure has been denied to professors who had good research programs but horrid teaching assessments. My advisor was just promoted to "Curators Teaching Professor of Mechanical Engineering" - a significant promotion that is entirely based on educational merits. The teaching priority includes the teaching of upperclassmen and graduate students, not just massive gen-ed freshman lectures, and thus some success in research is necessary though not sufficient. The two aren't at odds with each other: they're complementary
I do recognize that not all universities, or all departments within universities, share exactly the same priorities. And there are certainly some lazy professors who slip through and manage to gain tenure (though not necessarily many promotions after that ...). And the concern that some professors are not skilled as instructors is a valid one. Training as an instructor, on the other hand, is primarily provided through mentoring in the advisor/graduate student relationship - if the professor under whom you study is a good educator, you'll be able to learn from him how to become one yourself. This is perhaps unfortunate for students of less skilled instructors, but given the uselessness of 95% of the educational curriculum noted above, I'm not sure the mentoring approach isn't better nonetheless.
If you can't be clear headed when an unexpected situation arises while driving, you really shouldn't be driving to begin with.
Computer aren't exactly a new-fangled technology, and most cars built after the 70's or so have had some form of by-wire throttle control (I'm speaking, of course, of electronically controlled anti-lock brake systems which, while not fully by-wire, include a by-wire system alongside the mechanical one).
Huh? ABS systems didn't come out nearly that early, have no interaction whatsoever with the throttle, and aren't even braking-by-wire: they can momentarily relieve the pressure on a brake line to prevent wheel lock-up, but they can't apply the brakes on their own (except in newer vehicles when combined with a traction control system, which can apply brakes and retard engine timing, etc. to arrest wheel spin). I agree that there's no need to be paranoid about computer controls, but where do you get the idea of ABS as by-wire throttle control?
If the fuel line is pinched, for example, flooring it would cause devastating detonation, EXCEPT in "by wire".
Sorry, but that's not true. It is true that in off-road race engines, where the mixture is usually somewhat fuel-rich, leaning it out will cause higher combustion temperatures, but those peak temperatures occur very close to the stoichiometric fuel/air ratio that all modern cars with three-way catalytic converters are designed to operate at. If you lean it out from there, you'll have a much more dilute mixture, which not only makes detonation much less likely to occur, but in that extreme, makes it less likely that the fuel will ignite at all. I did my dissertation research on highly dilute SI combustion, and even with a very advanced spark timing, the problems to be avoided are always misfires and incomplete combustion, not detonation.
Besides that, the ECU has full control of the ignition timing on new vehicles, and control of spark advance from the base timing even on older vehicles that still used distributors. By retarding the spark timing, knock can be easily avoided even under conditions much more favorable than the ultra-lean mixture that would result from WOT and a pinched fuel line.
I'm not suggesting that there are no benefits to drive-by-wire throttle control. There certainly are, especially in more technologically advanced engines like the direct injection turbocharged engines Ford's rolling out. But the situation you pose where a mechanical throttle would supposedly be disastrous goes completely against how combustion physics actually work.
Of Boeing's commercial planes, all the information I can find indicates that only the 777 and the upcoming 787 Dreamliner are fly-by-wire - while clearly they're moving in that direction, it's far from being only the 737 that's not. And even there, Boeing and Airbus have radically different philosophies about the implementation. Airbus imposes hard limits on what the pilot is allowed to do (potentially contributing to several crashes), while Boeing imposes soft limits/warnings, but allows the pilots to have ultimate control and override the computer when necessary.
Documentation of the timing of when you invented it, that is.
It isn't really "simultaneous patents" which are the problem - you shouldn't *have* to patent your invention to avoid getting sued by someone who invented and patented theirs at the same time.
You don't have to patent it yourself if you want it to be available to everyone; it's sufficient to challenge his patent application and prove that you did it first. You only have to patent it yourself if you want the right to control whether others can use it. It's not the timing of the application that determines which inventor deserves the patent, but documentation of the timing. Now if it truly was simultaneous (or nearly so), an argument could be made that it shouldn't pass the non-obviousness test ...