Recording my movements to use against me in court is often referred to as a "witch hunt." If they have evidence, they can get a warrant. If they're looking for evidence, well, no, they may not arbitrarily search me or my house or my car until they find some.
Further, the GPS device tracks your car, not you. The implication that "you went where your car went" is full of holes, especially when more than one person has a set of keys (i.e. your girlfriend or your douchebag drug-dealing cousin.) A meatbag police officer would notice that a skinny woman with blonde hair isn't the overwieght bald 50-something suspect.
Should I encounter one of these devices, I posit it would promptly end up on a municipal bus.
It's not that I'm advocating that you perform the service yourself, but at least educate yourself such that you know the machine needs periodic maintenance. If you expect to derive income from your horse, but fail to feed and water it (because you couldn't be bothered to learn enough about horses to realize that periodic feeding and watering is required,) well, you have no right to bitch when the horse drops dead. Further, I have no obligation to feed and water your horse because you can't be bothered... regardless of how inconvenient the repercussions are to you.
Paying a service to feed and water your horse on a periodic basis is one way to satisfy the maintenance requirement, however to be certain that the services are being performed properly, you need to educate yourself as to what needs to be done. If you know nothing about your horse's operation, you can expect the service company to recommend replacing the horse's ball joints every six months.
I don't rely on horses as a primary source of income. If I did, you can bet I would know a lot about them. However, te average computer user doesn't give a crap about knowing anything about the machine or the OS, in spite of it being a necessary part of their life. Same goes for cars. When Fred's Pinto abandons him on the side of the road, he's more than eager to demand that I fix it for him, because I know how to do so, and otherwise it's a catastrophe of epic proportions. Oh, and I'm a bad person because I won't help.
Getting back to the horse riding and glass blowing... I'm ignorant with respect to both. (Note - yes, you are "ignorant" if you say you don't know anything about the topic.) However, I'm willing to learn and to experiment and to make mistakes along the way. Being intentionally ignorant is right up there with being entitled. "I don't want to know how a car works... I just want to go from Point A to Point B" is an entitlement attitude. Use public transportation in that case. Otherwise, car/horse/product ownership comes with responsibilities.
Looks similar to a Great Planes 65cc 80-85-160 Brushless Outrunner Electric Motor. This particular motor is rated for 7500 W continuous, 8400 W surge. No, I didn't accidentally add a zero. Yes, approximately 10hp out of a motor that fits in a 3.5" cube. Outrunners are pretty damned amazing.
Note - to achieve this power level, you'll need to feed said motor with 125 amps at 30-50V. No small task there.
At about 0:44 in the video included in TFA, you can see them starting to load out the batteries. There appears to be one battery pack per motor, which eliminates the possibility of centralized battery failure. Can't say if there are redundancies in the control mechanisms.
This is most certainly a proof-of-concept prototype. Adding more robust safety and control systems should happen after they prove the thing works, which it appears they have.
A tip-o-the-hat to the e-volo team for brightening my day.
You forgot "tasty" in your descriptors of Earth's biodiversity - humans are likely a bigger threat to critters than an increase of average temperatures. Look at what we've done to the oceans so far.
"Happy" and "sad" are a bound pair - you can't have one without the other. If you were happy all the time, never experiencing sadness, the term "happy" would be meaningless. You would just "be."
Your tongue rattles around inside your mouth all the time. Plenty of contact sensations there, the vast majority of which are ignored because they are always there. Munching a strawberry is pleasant; munching your tongue is unpleasant. So your tongue-contact state space decomposes into "pleasant," "unpleasant," and "meh." Pleasant and Unpleasant are a duality pair - eliminate one and the other goes with it. You're just left with "meh" at that point.
Wires can be pretty damned reliable things, in spite of needing occasional replacement when "worn out" on moving subassemblies. Using a wireless interface in a situation that doesn't absolutely require one is "not smart."
Most of the responses so far are people getting hung-up on the example and responding "wireless brakes on a bike are teh shitz." If you read the PDF, they're pretty clear that the experiment is about real-time control systems using wireless communications links. The wireless bike brake is a convenient structure to do some real-world prototyping, and provides some environmental bounds (response time, lag, bandwidth, etc.) that ratchet this up one level above being a purely academic exercise.
That said, the authors are faced with the horrible reality of wireless links - they are completely unreliable. Fundamentally. Period. The aether is a shared medium, and as such, you have to deal with collisions from other transmitters and interference from unintentional radiators (microwave oven, I'm looking at you.) The objective response time in this experiment is 150mS in the wireless link, and 100mS in the physical actuator. Ignoring the actuator time, 150mS is an abstract number without context. If you're brewing coffee wirelessly, 150mS to close the loop on the temperature control is effectively "instant." [no pun intended] However, if you're measuring RPM feedback on a turbine shaft, 150mS may be an eternity.
If you're placing the wireless link in the feedback path of a control loop, which these guys are doing, you have to account for the characteristics of the wireless link as part of the control loop stability analysis. Modeling packet loss and transmission delay as the equivalent phase shift and frequency characteristic of a classical analog component can be quite challenging. Further, the characteristics of interference sources may place you squarely in the "doomed from the start" category. If the above mentioned microwave oven can impair your wireless link for the duration of a bag of popcorn, your 150mS response time is irrelevant.
Wireless links and hard real-time control systems go together like fish and bicycles do.
"Federal" roads? If you're referring to the Interstate Highway System in the US, the roads are owned and maintained by the states. There is Federal funding applied for construction and maintenance, but the Federal Government doesn't own the roads. Have a look the next time you're driving - you'll see State Police patrolling the highways, not Federal Highway Troopers.
Lesse, a 2011 Prius has an MSRP of $23,520. I can't recall a power company *ever* sticking me with that kind of infrastructure fee, even spread over 60 months.
This is classic cost-shifting from the power company onto you. You are paying the capital costs for the vehicle up-front. The power company gets benefit from that immediately, and only reimburses you for usage fees at net-metering rates. The power company should be building-out the infrastructure to handle the increased base and peak loads, but it's much more profitable if they can convince you to volunteer to do that for them, yes?
For this to be a "reasonable" deal, the power company would need to subsidise the up-front purchase costs of your vehicle, at which point you would be obligated to participate in the load-averaging program. I'm still not interested, thanks.
I have a family member who has a cardiac condition. I exist on 8-minutes-from-the-hospital alert daily. I have called the meat-wagon twice. Response for the ambulance was 11 minutes. The EMTs arrived in a separate vehicle 5 minutes later. I have demonstrated, more than once, that I can be out of my house and at the hospital ER entrance in less than 7 minutes. 7 minutes versus 16+ minutes makes a hell of a difference to a cardiac patient. Be thankful you don't walk in my shoes.
Bottom line - the vehicle is there for my convenience. I expect it to be at-the-ready on a moment's notice. I maintain the vehicle such that I have confidence that it will be ready when I demand it to be. Allowing a third-party to extract benefit/resources from my vehicle reduces my vehicle's benefit to me. Using EVs to supplement the power grid is a completely stupid idea.
Property Tax causes a fundamental shift in society. All "property" becomes property of the state, and you merely lease it rather than own it. If you fail to pay your taxes, the state will terminate your lease on said property, will re-claim said property, and lease it out to another party. Real estate in the US is already subject to this kind of lease-from-the-government structure.
A universal Property Tax hearkens back to medieval societies where all property grants (real estate, cows, shovels, etc) were issued by the king.
Slashdot Mirror
Recording my movements to use against me in court is often referred to as a "witch hunt." If they have evidence, they can get a warrant. If they're looking for evidence, well, no, they may not arbitrarily search me or my house or my car until they find some.
Further, the GPS device tracks your car, not you. The implication that "you went where your car went" is full of holes, especially when more than one person has a set of keys (i.e. your girlfriend or your douchebag drug-dealing cousin.) A meatbag police officer would notice that a skinny woman with blonde hair isn't the overwieght bald 50-something suspect.
Should I encounter one of these devices, I posit it would promptly end up on a municipal bus.
Thanks for the link. I couldn't locate the specific motors, so I took a guess. Still, 5kW is pretty impressive from something that small.
It's not that I'm advocating that you perform the service yourself, but at least educate yourself such that you know the machine needs periodic maintenance. If you expect to derive income from your horse, but fail to feed and water it (because you couldn't be bothered to learn enough about horses to realize that periodic feeding and watering is required,) well, you have no right to bitch when the horse drops dead. Further, I have no obligation to feed and water your horse because you can't be bothered ... regardless of how inconvenient the repercussions are to you.
Paying a service to feed and water your horse on a periodic basis is one way to satisfy the maintenance requirement, however to be certain that the services are being performed properly, you need to educate yourself as to what needs to be done. If you know nothing about your horse's operation, you can expect the service company to recommend replacing the horse's ball joints every six months.
I don't rely on horses as a primary source of income. If I did, you can bet I would know a lot about them. However, te average computer user doesn't give a crap about knowing anything about the machine or the OS, in spite of it being a necessary part of their life. Same goes for cars. When Fred's Pinto abandons him on the side of the road, he's more than eager to demand that I fix it for him, because I know how to do so, and otherwise it's a catastrophe of epic proportions. Oh, and I'm a bad person because I won't help.
... I'm ignorant with respect to both. (Note - yes, you are "ignorant" if you say you don't know anything about the topic.) However, I'm willing to learn and to experiment and to make mistakes along the way. Being intentionally ignorant is right up there with being entitled. "I don't want to know how a car works ... I just want to go from Point A to Point B" is an entitlement attitude. Use public transportation in that case. Otherwise, car/horse/product ownership comes with responsibilities.
Getting back to the horse riding and glass blowing
Looks similar to a Great Planes 65cc 80-85-160 Brushless Outrunner Electric Motor. This particular motor is rated for 7500 W continuous, 8400 W surge. No, I didn't accidentally add a zero. Yes, approximately 10hp out of a motor that fits in a 3.5" cube. Outrunners are pretty damned amazing.
Note - to achieve this power level, you'll need to feed said motor with 125 amps at 30-50V. No small task there.
At about 0:44 in the video included in TFA, you can see them starting to load out the batteries. There appears to be one battery pack per motor, which eliminates the possibility of centralized battery failure. Can't say if there are redundancies in the control mechanisms.
This is most certainly a proof-of-concept prototype. Adding more robust safety and control systems should happen after they prove the thing works, which it appears they have.
A tip-o-the-hat to the e-volo team for brightening my day.
Mr. Brannigan, please put the microphone down ... and put your pants back on.
You forgot "tasty" in your descriptors of Earth's biodiversity - humans are likely a bigger threat to critters than an increase of average temperatures. Look at what we've done to the oceans so far.
How do they work?
"Happy" and "sad" are a bound pair - you can't have one without the other. If you were happy all the time, never experiencing sadness, the term "happy" would be meaningless. You would just "be."
Your tongue rattles around inside your mouth all the time. Plenty of contact sensations there, the vast majority of which are ignored because they are always there. Munching a strawberry is pleasant; munching your tongue is unpleasant. So your tongue-contact state space decomposes into "pleasant," "unpleasant," and "meh." Pleasant and Unpleasant are a duality pair - eliminate one and the other goes with it. You're just left with "meh" at that point.
How would you Disneyfy the Carousel? Contestants asplode into a shower of unicorns and rainbows? "Release the magic within!"
What, no love for Miley Cyrus anymore?
Haven't read the Evil Overlord Handbook, have we? Don't announce your plans prior to their execution. Don't gloat over your victim's predicament.
The young-uhns ain't gonna understand this. I'd be surprised if they even would recognize Farrah Fawcett-Majors or Michael York.
... his name is Box.
As you exit my property, please see the large silvery gentleman
Wires can be pretty damned reliable things, in spite of needing occasional replacement when "worn out" on moving subassemblies. Using a wireless interface in a situation that doesn't absolutely require one is "not smart."
Most of the responses so far are people getting hung-up on the example and responding "wireless brakes on a bike are teh shitz." If you read the PDF, they're pretty clear that the experiment is about real-time control systems using wireless communications links. The wireless bike brake is a convenient structure to do some real-world prototyping, and provides some environmental bounds (response time, lag, bandwidth, etc.) that ratchet this up one level above being a purely academic exercise.
That said, the authors are faced with the horrible reality of wireless links - they are completely unreliable. Fundamentally. Period. The aether is a shared medium, and as such, you have to deal with collisions from other transmitters and interference from unintentional radiators (microwave oven, I'm looking at you.) The objective response time in this experiment is 150mS in the wireless link, and 100mS in the physical actuator. Ignoring the actuator time, 150mS is an abstract number without context. If you're brewing coffee wirelessly, 150mS to close the loop on the temperature control is effectively "instant." [no pun intended] However, if you're measuring RPM feedback on a turbine shaft, 150mS may be an eternity.
If you're placing the wireless link in the feedback path of a control loop, which these guys are doing, you have to account for the characteristics of the wireless link as part of the control loop stability analysis. Modeling packet loss and transmission delay as the equivalent phase shift and frequency characteristic of a classical analog component can be quite challenging. Further, the characteristics of interference sources may place you squarely in the "doomed from the start" category. If the above mentioned microwave oven can impair your wireless link for the duration of a bag of popcorn, your 150mS response time is irrelevant.
Wireless links and hard real-time control systems go together like fish and bicycles do.
Nah, you have to make sure the helicopter has the -R option (the rotor blades want to rotate the opposite direction south of the equator.)
Also, fuel that resembles vaseline will be a problem for any machine using a heat engine.
That all depends on how many trans-uranic Vogons are stuck on you. [Note - they are exceedingly expensive to remove.]
"Federal" roads? If you're referring to the Interstate Highway System in the US, the roads are owned and maintained by the states. There is Federal funding applied for construction and maintenance, but the Federal Government doesn't own the roads. Have a look the next time you're driving - you'll see State Police patrolling the highways, not Federal Highway Troopers.
Lesse, a 2011 Prius has an MSRP of $23,520. I can't recall a power company *ever* sticking me with that kind of infrastructure fee, even spread over 60 months.
This is classic cost-shifting from the power company onto you. You are paying the capital costs for the vehicle up-front. The power company gets benefit from that immediately, and only reimburses you for usage fees at net-metering rates. The power company should be building-out the infrastructure to handle the increased base and peak loads, but it's much more profitable if they can convince you to volunteer to do that for them, yes?
For this to be a "reasonable" deal, the power company would need to subsidise the up-front purchase costs of your vehicle, at which point you would be obligated to participate in the load-averaging program. I'm still not interested, thanks.
I have a family member who has a cardiac condition. I exist on 8-minutes-from-the-hospital alert daily. I have called the meat-wagon twice. Response for the ambulance was 11 minutes. The EMTs arrived in a separate vehicle 5 minutes later. I have demonstrated, more than once, that I can be out of my house and at the hospital ER entrance in less than 7 minutes. 7 minutes versus 16+ minutes makes a hell of a difference to a cardiac patient. Be thankful you don't walk in my shoes.
Bottom line - the vehicle is there for my convenience. I expect it to be at-the-ready on a moment's notice. I maintain the vehicle such that I have confidence that it will be ready when I demand it to be. Allowing a third-party to extract benefit/resources from my vehicle reduces my vehicle's benefit to me. Using EVs to supplement the power grid is a completely stupid idea.
I pity the fool who is confused by this. (Murdock can be heard in the distance screaming "Trashbag! Trashbag!")
Property Tax causes a fundamental shift in society. All "property" becomes property of the state, and you merely lease it rather than own it. If you fail to pay your taxes, the state will terminate your lease on said property, will re-claim said property, and lease it out to another party. Real estate in the US is already subject to this kind of lease-from-the-government structure.
A universal Property Tax hearkens back to medieval societies where all property grants (real estate, cows, shovels, etc) were issued by the king.
I figured they might know something about the impending Zombie Apocalypse.
Me thinks I need to invest in a shotgun and a case of shells.