It would be completely trivial to let a human override the limits. The car could easily be made to automatically alert authorities and even the other autonomous cars that an emergency override was in effect. That should make the journey considerably safer than when a distressed human driver is trying to deal with an emergency amongst a lot of other traffic who just think he is being an idiot.
Abuse is equally trivial to deal with. Every time you activate the override, you get a nice little chat with either the police or a judge.
In Denmark the law is quite easy: If you are doing emergency driving, you must attach a white piece of cloth to the car if possible (sticking white linen in the bonnet is the typical solution). Other traffic must obey the exact same rules when dealing with a marked car as they would if it was a regular emergency vehicle with the lights flashing. The driver of the marked car is not subject to regular traffic laws (but must of course still try to avoid accidents, it is not a license to kill). Once the emergency is over, the driver must report the journey to the police as soon as reasonably possible.
"Regular" Linux and Android are almost entirely distinct, with only the mostly-shared kernel in common. You can install some utilities to get a more Unix-like environment, but most users don't do that. It is probably easier to port a GNU/Linux application to Mac OS X (with the X subsystem) that it is to port it to Android.
You have a click-through EULA to get past though. Whether that is enforceable depends on the jurisdiction. Unfortunately I live in a jurisdiction where they are enforceable in general.
The problem with paying for this kind of welfare out of risk-blind insurance payments is that you end up making insurance blind to preventable pre-existing conditions as well, removing a strong incentive for people to stay healthy.
Does that mean we should replace the current warning labels on cigarettes with this?
"Smoking Causes Health Insurance Premiums to Rise"
Ultracaps have a chance in hybrids too, for "caching". They can save wear on the battery from short regenerative braking, and theoretically they should have lower loss for that purpose. Whether they can ever be made with sufficient capacity per weight and cheap enough to make it worthwhile is doubtful...
It would even be possible to quickly charge the ultracapacitor and then let it slowly charge the batteries afterwards... Whether that is useful in practice I am not sure, but maybe it could be combined with short stretches of induction loops in the road?
The reason is that Tesla holds the majority of useful patents for the ability to produce a decent electric car.
I doubt it. Electric cars are not such a novel technology, many manufacturers have made them in various forms for decades. If Tesla really was that important, it ought to be reasonably simple for the older manufacturers to buy them outright. All you see instead are some limited deals with e.g. Toyota, without much to show for it.
To hell with your freaky mutually-incompatible and non-standard ways to get 3amps over USB!
USB3 provides completely standard 5A charging. It's great that you love 12V. I don't think I have a single 12V device, all my notebook-type devices are 19V with weird plugs, and everything else is a random value from 3V to 24V (but strangely not 12V), sometimes AC and sometimes DC, with no relation between plug type and voltage or current requirements. I have discarded otherwise-functioning devices because I lost the power cord and it was not worth it to get a new one.
I really look forward to getting it all onto USB3.
Android does not have a proper multi-window management yet.
On the upside, neither does anything else anymore. Well KDE maybe. For the rest, the best you can do is make everything full screen with tabs and switch between them. You can put a full screen window on each monitor if you have more monitors though. There are even monitors with built in window managers to make up for OS deficiencies, where you can present a single monitor to the PC as multiple. That sort of highlights the sad state of modern GUIs.
If you are trying to reach an access point 150m away, you are not in a densely populated area. 2.4GHz will work fine for you without interference. The lower range of 5GHz is an advantage, it helps ensure that the band has low interference.
(Although I am sure it will get crowded soon. 60GHz, here we come...)
Wifi is half duplex. Ethernet is full duplex. Ack packets are not a problem for speed tests on ethernet, because they flow in the otherwise-unused 1Gbps return bandwidth, whereas with Wifi they steal bandwidth from the useful traffic. It gets worse, because Wifi has a non-zero "turnaround-time", so every time the client has to ack packets, it leaves the spectrum empty for a moment.
That device is cheating. Most of the energy output is from fission. Most "hydrogen" bombs use the fusion as a neutron generator to induce fast fission. The energy boost from the fission is a nice extra, but not all that important.
You could build a nuclear power plant like that, with a fusion device at the center to generate lots of neutrons to strike a uranium cladding. It would have the advantage of being unable to melt down (as the cladding does not have to be near criticality), but it would be somewhat more expensive than existing designs. It would also have the same waste product and decommissioning challenges as existing reactors.
They don't need the money, they just need to take it out of his ability to use.
This is one of the problems with BitCoin. Coins will be lost over time, as people forget their passwords or die or are otherwise prevented from accessing their wallets. There is no way to get them back or replace them.
If your fridge is halfway decent, it will have an electronically controlled asynchronous motor with power factor correction.
Practically everything else sold today will have power factor correction as well, unless its draw is so small that it doesn't matter.
And the synchronization motor is not there to fix how meters work. It is there to prevent the grid breaking down. It would be there even if electricity was free.
are compatible with tons of different OS, from slightly modified stock firmware (it's open source) to DD-WRT.
As long as you do not modify the kernel. They are Broadcom devices, so your kernel has to be compatible with the binary crap that came with the router.
I'm not sure it is even possible to get a non-Broadcom router with decent performance these days.
One of the big unknowns regarding the Tesla S was how the battery would do if things went badly in an accident and it caught fire. Now we have much more of an idea. The fire was kept out of the cabin and it was relatively undramatic. Parts of the car might even still be usable.
I am feeling more confident about the fire safety of the model S now.
Please do not make a single hierarchy like X.509, where one particular key can only be certified by one authority. Instead, at minimum allow multiple signatures if you do not want to implement the complete web-of-trust like PGP/GPG.
Having support for a large number of different algorithms in a program or standard increases the risk of downgrade attacks. If just one of the algorithms turns out to be weak, an attacker might be able to lure the two parties into picking a less secure algorithm when they negotiate.
The nice thing about existing hydro with reservoirs is that you can multiply its output by about 2 by putting up land-based wind turbines with the same total rated power and just saving water when the wind blows. If you can do offshore wind, you can multiply by about 3 instead as the wind is more reliable.
If you happen to be far away from the equator and dependent on the spring melt water to fill the reservoirs, you can do perhaps a factor of 3 for land-based and 4 for offshore, as the turbines produce the most power when you need it the most, in winter when your reservoirs are running dry. The short-fall of wind in summer matches up with reservoir overruns.
You may have to install more generators at the hydro plant, but generally those are cheap in comparison to the cost of the dam.
8GW is somewhere in the region of 2000 offshore wind turbines in 2015 (Vestas V164 8.0MW). Well slightly less, as those should be capable of more than 50% output on average, and nuclear power plants deliver around 90% output in their prime. Both scenarios require the availability of reservoir-based hydro power to match the demand curve to the supply as both wind and nuclear are inflexible.
2000 wind turbines is a reasonably manageable amount. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa had 881 employees doing "radiation work" in 1998 (the last year I could find information for); presumably there are a lot of employees just doing administration as well without. Let us say at least 1000 employees in total. In comparison, Anholt Havmøllepark with 111 3.6MW wind turbines requires approximately 50 people. If we assume that 8MW turbines require the same amount of maintenance as 3.6MW turbines (an optimistic assumption admittedly), the number of employees needed for 8GW wind power comes to around 1000 as well.
So, instead of it being a thousand times more people, it is actually around the same amount of people. Perhaps my estimates are an order of magnitude wrong, but they are not 3 orders off.
First of all, your memory of how Chernobyl went wrong is off. You should read the account again, it has been extensively researched by now. It was a bad design, absolutely, and the engineers on duty did not understand what they were doing to it when they deliberately ran it at too-low power for too long, but they did not intend a scram. Anyway, we can discount Chernobyl, no one will ever build a reactor like that (alas, there are still Chernobyl-type reactors operating).
I consider myself an environmentalist, so it is a bit annoying to be tainted with the "nuclear is poison" and "DHMO must be banned" brush. I think you give environmentalists too much credit though if you think they could stop nuclear power plants being built practically throughout the world. We have certainly been much less successful when it comes to coal mines and oil rigs, even though those are more harmful. The major difference seems to be that coal and oil is actually profitable whereas modern nuclear power needs more subsidy than even offshore wind power.
Also, I remember arguments from the pro-nuclear side that Japan was an example of how nuclear power could be safe and profitable when it is done right. Well, it turns out it was not done right, and suddenly there is a lot of criticism about how Fukushima was built. Where are the critical articles about German power plants? About French? They were built at the same time, were they really built so much better? Let us see how the French handle a really hot summer where the rivers they use for cooling cannot provide enough water -- they have had that problem before, but at least there was still enough water to cool the reactors after they were shut down.
Smaller nuclear power plants are even less economical, and if a storm hits you have to spread your people thin, trying to handle a bunch of spread-out plants generally located in out-of-the-way areas. That does not seem like an obvious improvement to me.
Luckily it is all academic, only China and Finland are doing significant nuclear expansion, and the ones in Finland have turned out ridiculously expensive so they will not be trying that again. England is waving pound bills around desperately, but no one is biting, despite there being plenty of existing nuclear sites available where NIMBY'ism is a solved problem.
Many existing hydro power plants rely on natural height differences rather than large reservoirs. They do not have a large environmental impact. Of course most such sites are now in use, so new hydro is problematic in most cases.
Both plants also required electrical power being supplied to those plants simply to operate.
You present that as a wrong-headed design and imply that other nuclear power plants can operate without grid power. I'd like you to show me a currently running commercial reactor which can do that. Practically no base-load power plant, no matter their type, can do that. The only ones that can generally run as an island are peak gas-powered plants.
It is not a particularly interesting capability either. A nuclear power station that goes off the grid has a serious problem getting rid of all the power it generates. The only solution is to scram, and that quickly means you have no power anyway. You cannot turn a nuclear power plant down to e.g. 1%, that is just not how they work.
Newer designs are very proud that they can cool their reactors during/after a scram without relying on electrical power. However, that is only true for a relatively short period (days), then they run out of cooling water. Getting rid of hundreds of megawatts cannot be done for any length of time without pumps, unless you submerge the power plant entirely in the ocean.
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It would be completely trivial to let a human override the limits. The car could easily be made to automatically alert authorities and even the other autonomous cars that an emergency override was in effect. That should make the journey considerably safer than when a distressed human driver is trying to deal with an emergency amongst a lot of other traffic who just think he is being an idiot.
Abuse is equally trivial to deal with. Every time you activate the override, you get a nice little chat with either the police or a judge.
In Denmark the law is quite easy: If you are doing emergency driving, you must attach a white piece of cloth to the car if possible (sticking white linen in the bonnet is the typical solution). Other traffic must obey the exact same rules when dealing with a marked car as they would if it was a regular emergency vehicle with the lights flashing. The driver of the marked car is not subject to regular traffic laws (but must of course still try to avoid accidents, it is not a license to kill). Once the emergency is over, the driver must report the journey to the police as soon as reasonably possible.
"Regular" Linux and Android are almost entirely distinct, with only the mostly-shared kernel in common. You can install some utilities to get a more Unix-like environment, but most users don't do that. It is probably easier to port a GNU/Linux application to Mac OS X (with the X subsystem) that it is to port it to Android.
You have a click-through EULA to get past though. Whether that is enforceable depends on the jurisdiction. Unfortunately I live in a jurisdiction where they are enforceable in general.
The problem with paying for this kind of welfare out of risk-blind insurance payments is that you end up making insurance blind to preventable pre-existing conditions as well, removing a strong incentive for people to stay healthy.
Does that mean we should replace the current warning labels on cigarettes with this?
"Smoking Causes Health Insurance Premiums to Rise"
Ultracaps have a chance in hybrids too, for "caching". They can save wear on the battery from short regenerative braking, and theoretically they should have lower loss for that purpose. Whether they can ever be made with sufficient capacity per weight and cheap enough to make it worthwhile is doubtful...
It would even be possible to quickly charge the ultracapacitor and then let it slowly charge the batteries afterwards... Whether that is useful in practice I am not sure, but maybe it could be combined with short stretches of induction loops in the road?
The reason is that Tesla holds the majority of useful patents for the ability to produce a decent electric car.
I doubt it. Electric cars are not such a novel technology, many manufacturers have made them in various forms for decades. If Tesla really was that important, it ought to be reasonably simple for the older manufacturers to buy them outright. All you see instead are some limited deals with e.g. Toyota, without much to show for it.
To hell with your freaky mutually-incompatible and non-standard ways to get 3amps over USB!
USB3 provides completely standard 5A charging. It's great that you love 12V. I don't think I have a single 12V device, all my notebook-type devices are 19V with weird plugs, and everything else is a random value from 3V to 24V (but strangely not 12V), sometimes AC and sometimes DC, with no relation between plug type and voltage or current requirements. I have discarded otherwise-functioning devices because I lost the power cord and it was not worth it to get a new one.
I really look forward to getting it all onto USB3.
Android does not have a proper multi-window management yet.
On the upside, neither does anything else anymore. Well KDE maybe. For the rest, the best you can do is make everything full screen with tabs and switch between them. You can put a full screen window on each monitor if you have more monitors though. There are even monitors with built in window managers to make up for OS deficiencies, where you can present a single monitor to the PC as multiple. That sort of highlights the sad state of modern GUIs.
If you are trying to reach an access point 150m away, you are not in a densely populated area. 2.4GHz will work fine for you without interference. The lower range of 5GHz is an advantage, it helps ensure that the band has low interference.
(Although I am sure it will get crowded soon. 60GHz, here we come...)
Wifi is half duplex. Ethernet is full duplex. Ack packets are not a problem for speed tests on ethernet, because they flow in the otherwise-unused 1Gbps return bandwidth, whereas with Wifi they steal bandwidth from the useful traffic. It gets worse, because Wifi has a non-zero "turnaround-time", so every time the client has to ack packets, it leaves the spectrum empty for a moment.
That device is cheating. Most of the energy output is from fission. Most "hydrogen" bombs use the fusion as a neutron generator to induce fast fission. The energy boost from the fission is a nice extra, but not all that important.
You could build a nuclear power plant like that, with a fusion device at the center to generate lots of neutrons to strike a uranium cladding. It would have the advantage of being unable to melt down (as the cladding does not have to be near criticality), but it would be somewhat more expensive than existing designs. It would also have the same waste product and decommissioning challenges as existing reactors.
If you loose cash it's gone as well.
Yes, but we can just print more.
They don't need the money, they just need to take it out of his ability to use.
This is one of the problems with BitCoin. Coins will be lost over time, as people forget their passwords or die or are otherwise prevented from accessing their wallets. There is no way to get them back or replace them.
If your fridge is halfway decent, it will have an electronically controlled asynchronous motor with power factor correction.
Practically everything else sold today will have power factor correction as well, unless its draw is so small that it doesn't matter.
And the synchronization motor is not there to fix how meters work. It is there to prevent the grid breaking down. It would be there even if electricity was free.
are compatible with tons of different OS, from slightly modified stock firmware (it's open source) to DD-WRT.
As long as you do not modify the kernel. They are Broadcom devices, so your kernel has to be compatible with the binary crap that came with the router.
I'm not sure it is even possible to get a non-Broadcom router with decent performance these days.
One of the big unknowns regarding the Tesla S was how the battery would do if things went badly in an accident and it caught fire. Now we have much more of an idea. The fire was kept out of the cabin and it was relatively undramatic. Parts of the car might even still be usable.
I am feeling more confident about the fire safety of the model S now.
Please do not make a single hierarchy like X.509, where one particular key can only be certified by one authority. Instead, at minimum allow multiple signatures if you do not want to implement the complete web-of-trust like PGP/GPG.
Having support for a large number of different algorithms in a program or standard increases the risk of downgrade attacks. If just one of the algorithms turns out to be weak, an attacker might be able to lure the two parties into picking a less secure algorithm when they negotiate.
The nice thing about existing hydro with reservoirs is that you can multiply its output by about 2 by putting up land-based wind turbines with the same total rated power and just saving water when the wind blows. If you can do offshore wind, you can multiply by about 3 instead as the wind is more reliable.
If you happen to be far away from the equator and dependent on the spring melt water to fill the reservoirs, you can do perhaps a factor of 3 for land-based and 4 for offshore, as the turbines produce the most power when you need it the most, in winter when your reservoirs are running dry. The short-fall of wind in summer matches up with reservoir overruns.
You may have to install more generators at the hydro plant, but generally those are cheap in comparison to the cost of the dam.
8GW is somewhere in the region of 2000 offshore wind turbines in 2015 (Vestas V164 8.0MW). Well slightly less, as those should be capable of more than 50% output on average, and nuclear power plants deliver around 90% output in their prime. Both scenarios require the availability of reservoir-based hydro power to match the demand curve to the supply as both wind and nuclear are inflexible.
2000 wind turbines is a reasonably manageable amount. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa had 881 employees doing "radiation work" in 1998 (the last year I could find information for); presumably there are a lot of employees just doing administration as well without. Let us say at least 1000 employees in total. In comparison, Anholt Havmøllepark with 111 3.6MW wind turbines requires approximately 50 people. If we assume that 8MW turbines require the same amount of maintenance as 3.6MW turbines (an optimistic assumption admittedly), the number of employees needed for 8GW wind power comes to around 1000 as well.
So, instead of it being a thousand times more people, it is actually around the same amount of people. Perhaps my estimates are an order of magnitude wrong, but they are not 3 orders off.
First of all, your memory of how Chernobyl went wrong is off. You should read the account again, it has been extensively researched by now. It was a bad design, absolutely, and the engineers on duty did not understand what they were doing to it when they deliberately ran it at too-low power for too long, but they did not intend a scram. Anyway, we can discount Chernobyl, no one will ever build a reactor like that (alas, there are still Chernobyl-type reactors operating).
I consider myself an environmentalist, so it is a bit annoying to be tainted with the "nuclear is poison" and "DHMO must be banned" brush. I think you give environmentalists too much credit though if you think they could stop nuclear power plants being built practically throughout the world. We have certainly been much less successful when it comes to coal mines and oil rigs, even though those are more harmful. The major difference seems to be that coal and oil is actually profitable whereas modern nuclear power needs more subsidy than even offshore wind power.
Also, I remember arguments from the pro-nuclear side that Japan was an example of how nuclear power could be safe and profitable when it is done right. Well, it turns out it was not done right, and suddenly there is a lot of criticism about how Fukushima was built. Where are the critical articles about German power plants? About French? They were built at the same time, were they really built so much better? Let us see how the French handle a really hot summer where the rivers they use for cooling cannot provide enough water -- they have had that problem before, but at least there was still enough water to cool the reactors after they were shut down.
Smaller nuclear power plants are even less economical, and if a storm hits you have to spread your people thin, trying to handle a bunch of spread-out plants generally located in out-of-the-way areas. That does not seem like an obvious improvement to me.
Luckily it is all academic, only China and Finland are doing significant nuclear expansion, and the ones in Finland have turned out ridiculously expensive so they will not be trying that again. England is waving pound bills around desperately, but no one is biting, despite there being plenty of existing nuclear sites available where NIMBY'ism is a solved problem.
How do you stand up a 437GW nuclear power plant? They tend to be in the 2GW range, if they have multiple reactors.
Whereas a molten salt or thorium reactor is far safer and doesn't have the proliferation aspects deal with.
I love that highly reactive radioactive salts at 300C are considered safer than current designs.
Many existing hydro power plants rely on natural height differences rather than large reservoirs. They do not have a large environmental impact. Of course most such sites are now in use, so new hydro is problematic in most cases.
Both plants also required electrical power being supplied to those plants simply to operate.
You present that as a wrong-headed design and imply that other nuclear power plants can operate without grid power. I'd like you to show me a currently running commercial reactor which can do that. Practically no base-load power plant, no matter their type, can do that. The only ones that can generally run as an island are peak gas-powered plants.
It is not a particularly interesting capability either. A nuclear power station that goes off the grid has a serious problem getting rid of all the power it generates. The only solution is to scram, and that quickly means you have no power anyway. You cannot turn a nuclear power plant down to e.g. 1%, that is just not how they work.
Newer designs are very proud that they can cool their reactors during/after a scram without relying on electrical power. However, that is only true for a relatively short period (days), then they run out of cooling water. Getting rid of hundreds of megawatts cannot be done for any length of time without pumps, unless you submerge the power plant entirely in the ocean.