Definitely spend the extra bucks for the faster model and other bells and whistles. We got ours before they had 4 wheel drive and ludicrous mode, but we do have the P85 performance model and it's a blast. No other normal looking car accelerates like a Tesla. It accelerates faster than the Corvette Z06 I had. For a heavy car it handles well. It's drivable in the snow, but leave plenty of stopping distance because of the weight. In your case you have other cars to drive.
Also plan on putting 100 Amps of 220 in your garage. Maximum charging current is 80 amps and it charges about 60 miles of range per hour at 80 amps. When we park it in the garage we always plug it in and it's fully charged in the morning.
When you first get one, you stress out with range anxiety. That goes away in a week or so. We never worry about range anymore, but we also never use it for driving trips.
I had a good friend who collected interesting vehicles. He had a Duck. I have to admit it was a lot of fun. Enjoy!
$7500 did not not make me decide to buy a Tesla, I would have bought it anyway although I may have done without a couple of options. Although its not a big sample, the other electric car owners I know feel the same way. What has made electric cars fashionable is the Tesla, a car made possible by current technology and some talented people - not a tax break. The clear evidence for global warming is also a driving factor for electric vehicles.
That said, I agree with the implication that the electric car subsidy is unfair and should be curtailed. An even bigger issue is the fact that our roads are paid by fuel taxes that electric car owners do not pay.
On the other hand... The environmental cost of fossil fuels should probably be borne by those who burn them. I have no idea how to quantify it.
To me, sustainability is about conserving the limited resources our planet offers and maintaining a healthy ecosystem for us to thrive in. CO2 emissions are directly related to the combustion of fossil fuel and disrupt the balance of our environment. These emissions if uncontrolled threaten the ability of earth to sustain life as we know it.
At least its possible that electric vehicles can be sustainable. Gas/diesel motors will always emit CO2. Where I live in the Chicago area, I can pay a small amount extra so all my electric generation goes to wind and solar. This costs between $5 and $10 dollars extra a month. People that buy electric vehicles today are generally willing to pay a little extra for sustainable power.
Actually I think it works the way Einstein thought:-) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - specifically the section labeled "Planetary Reference Frame".
Because I think it's more practical to send a machine on a round trip, I was thinking about it in terms of earth's frame of reference, not the traveller. From the traveller's frame of reference, it should be fewer years - no?
The last time I did the calculation, I came up with.77 C after one year and.97 C after 2 years, but I didn't have anybody to check my work and I may be wrong. I'm pretty certain I'm in the ballpark though.
All that said, while the laws of physics allow for the possibility, foreseeable technology does not. I'll work on the engines - the shield is somebody else's problem because I have absolutely no idea how that could be solved...
If you accelerate at 1G for a little less than a year, you will be travelling pretty close to the speed of light. Add a year of deceleration plus the travel time and it should be physically feasible to travel a distance of 4 light years in between 5 and 7 years.
Obviously this would require propulsion technology that has not yet been developed, but may very well be not only feasible, but available within the next 100 years.
Safe high efficiency mass to energy conversion is required. e=mc2 tells us that reasonable amount of mass is more than capable of delivering the energy needed for acceleration. While the technology to convert mass directly to energy does not yet exist, one cannot rule out the possibility within the laws of physics as we know them.
Propellant is another matter and this would limit the size of the payload. Propellantless propulsion is a much better alternative. Although it's initially hard to believe possible, working models of such a thing do exist.
There are many other big problems to solve. For example, hitting even the tiniest grain of sand along the way would make for a very bad day so some kind of magic shield would be needed.
Using current technology such a trip would not be remotely feasible. We however don't need any crazy science fiction magic like warp drive or wormholes. We're like Jules Verne over a hundred years ago. He knew that a trip to the moon was feasible, but the only conceivable technology of his day was a big gun to shoot people there. We can travel to the stars within the limitations of the speed of light; we just don't have the details of the technology yet.
Most software is not fine art, it's a tool made by paid professionals for paid professionals. If there isn't a viable return on the investment made for maintenance and enhancement, the program will languish and die. Programs are not people a right to live and be cared for. Often the business decisions are faulty and software that is worthy of investment is ignored. These businesses are often not competitive and they die along with their creations. Sometimes a program's value only warrants a minimal maintenance investment. Admittedly, it's no fun doing a half-assed job, but sometimes you just have to hold your nose and do the minimum.
All too often business decision makers don't understand the tradeoffs and value of software maintenance. Equally, developers ignore the business aspect of their creations and cry for purity from their ivory tower for programs that do not warrant further Investment. Both camps have to learn to take the wider view.
I've learned to advise that when software is developed, a maintenance budget be crafted from the inception of the program and projected through the entire program's expected life. Having this planned in the beginning of a system's lifecycle promotes satisfaction, success, quality and long life.
My biggest problem is how they threw out the entire carefully curated universe in the novels. There is a huge rich and varied source of original ideas with complex moral dilemmas that many Star Wars fans are unaware of. What a shame they didn't use some of that instead of a rehash of the first Star Wars movie plot.
There is that magical structural integrity field. If the Enterprise in Generations can crash into a planet and have people walk away with nary a scratch, I figure what's a few atmospheres. Just sayin...
My dad spent much of his career working next to a 50,000 watt AM radio transmitter. He would hold a fluorescent light near the transmission lines going out to the antenna array and it would light up in mid air. Neither he nor any of his colleagues experienced any ill effects including higher cancer rates. Granted, this is much lower frequency than wifi, which can potentially be ionizing. Based on this direct personal experience though fear of RF is largely irrational.
It's not about Elon, its about the car and the people who make up the company. As a Tesla owner, I thought I'd respond to your comments.
1) They are taking the opportunity to do the right thing, check out every car for other issues, and getting great publicity. If they find one more car with an assembly problem like this, and however remotely possible that car is in an accident, this recall paid for itself.
2) It probably won't cost them anything at all because the techs are paid a salary and need something to do anyway. From our experience the cars require little maintenance.
3) OK
4A) The Model S is fairly priced for what it is; its not the car for everybody.
4B) The Model S has a 4 year Warranty with everything but tires covered. We paid another $3500 a year and a half ago to extend that to 8 years. This warranty policy makes 3rd party repair obsolete and I cannot think of another car of any kind that you can maintain for flat rate of $3500 for 8 years. I don't understand your point that maintenance on the Model S is expensive.
4C) You are correct; the Model S is a beta test of sorts. People who can afford a relatively expensive car are funding a business model that develops the capacity to make lower priced electric cars. Problems with any new technology is to be expected, but this one has been remarkably smooth for us. We got our Model S in April 2013 and I knew I was taking a pretty big chance. It paid off - we have had almost no trouble at all.
I'm pretty sure all Model S cars are still under the warranty that covers everything except tires. Also, I think they drive to where your car is parked to perform the service.
They are probably going to harvest deep sea metal nodules. This was a big thing back in the 70's but I don't think it ever got past the research stage. If all they are doing is harvesting the potato sized nodules from the surface of the sea floor, it may not be that big of an environmental disaster.
This article is incredibly short on details, but it's inconceivable that they would try to smelt the ore on the ocean floor. How they process the ore once on land is another matter, but we're already doing this with ore obtained on land so the environmental impacts are well understood.
On top of all that, communications can be encrypted with ssl so I'm not sure how router packet sniffing would be totally effective. They could easily use peer to peer technology to defeat any possible IP filtering strategy. Seriously, Microsoft could have the ultimate botnet tomorrow, but why would they do that?
Ignorance may be bliss, but from a information security standpoint, most of us place implicit trust in bios vendors, circuit board vendors and their firmware, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and the list goes on. If any of these people really want your data they have the means to get it. If you think they aren't smart enough to hide their activity you're delusional. The fact is, our activity isn't really that interesting and these people aren't crooks so it's an acceptable risk.
If you run Windows you implicitly trust Microsoft. If you run Linux, you implicitly trust the open source movement. If Microsoft wants your data they have the means to get it. If for some reason they needed to hide that fact, nobody would likely know.
What I've noticed on the older processors that get hot is that the internal bond inside he device doesn't conduct heat as well and the processor goes into a death spiral of increasing temperature if it overheats. I've learned that monitoring the cpu temp and making sure it never gets too hot is critical. If you really want to milk a processor for 10 years (and I have servers older than that) an ounce of thermal prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The real improvement these days is low power, increased performance from ssd, faster i/o with new chip sets and faster memory with ddr4. Additionally, decent integrated graphics bring overall system cost down. Strictly looking at cpu benchmarks paints a darker picture that is really the case.
That said, i agree Moore's law seems to be on the ropes...
If the US constitution requires the federal government to be responsible for national defense, why wouldn't some of our defense money be spent on antibiotics and vaccines? If the free market is dropping the ball, it needs to get picked up in some way.
I got to thinking about this problem.The L1,2 and 3 cache on the CPU would largely mitigate this. The trend has been to increase the size of the on die CPU cache. Perhaps a vastly increased L3 cache in the gigabytes and a wear levelling non volatile ram controller would fully address this problem.
Using XPoint as a successor to mass storage in my mind is short term thinking. Maybe its a quick way to sell the technology in the near term, but certainly not the best use case.
We should get away from mass storage altogether and use this as replacement for RAM. It will take a rethinking of operating system structure, but promises to provide instant on computers with all programs and data always loaded and ready for immediate access. Database systems would immediately be orders of magnitude faster because all data is always ready for access.
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Definitely spend the extra bucks for the faster model and other bells and whistles. We got ours before they had 4 wheel drive and ludicrous mode, but we do have the P85 performance model and it's a blast. No other normal looking car accelerates like a Tesla. It accelerates faster than the Corvette Z06 I had. For a heavy car it handles well. It's drivable in the snow, but leave plenty of stopping distance because of the weight. In your case you have other cars to drive.
Also plan on putting 100 Amps of 220 in your garage. Maximum charging current is 80 amps and it charges about 60 miles of range per hour at 80 amps. When we park it in the garage we always plug it in and it's fully charged in the morning.
When you first get one, you stress out with range anxiety. That goes away in a week or so. We never worry about range anymore, but we also never use it for driving trips.
I had a good friend who collected interesting vehicles. He had a Duck. I have to admit it was a lot of fun. Enjoy!
I agree and disagree.
$7500 did not not make me decide to buy a Tesla, I would have bought it anyway although I may have done without a couple of options. Although its not a big sample, the other electric car owners I know feel the same way. What has made electric cars fashionable is the Tesla, a car made possible by current technology and some talented people - not a tax break. The clear evidence for global warming is also a driving factor for electric vehicles.
That said, I agree with the implication that the electric car subsidy is unfair and should be curtailed. An even bigger issue is the fact that our roads are paid by fuel taxes that electric car owners do not pay.
On the other hand... The environmental cost of fossil fuels should probably be borne by those who burn them. I have no idea how to quantify it.
You will love your Tesla.
To me, sustainability is about conserving the limited resources our planet offers and maintaining a healthy ecosystem for us to thrive in. CO2 emissions are directly related to the combustion of fossil fuel and disrupt the balance of our environment. These emissions if uncontrolled threaten the ability of earth to sustain life as we know it.
At least its possible that electric vehicles can be sustainable. Gas/diesel motors will always emit CO2. Where I live in the Chicago area, I can pay a small amount extra so all my electric generation goes to wind and solar. This costs between $5 and $10 dollars extra a month. People that buy electric vehicles today are generally willing to pay a little extra for sustainable power.
Actually I think it works the way Einstein thought :-) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - specifically the section labeled "Planetary Reference Frame".
.77 C after one year and .97 C after 2 years, but I didn't have anybody to check my work and I may be wrong. I'm pretty certain I'm in the ballpark though.
Because I think it's more practical to send a machine on a round trip, I was thinking about it in terms of earth's frame of reference, not the traveller. From the traveller's frame of reference, it should be fewer years - no?
The last time I did the calculation, I came up with
All that said, while the laws of physics allow for the possibility, foreseeable technology does not. I'll work on the engines - the shield is somebody else's problem because I have absolutely no idea how that could be solved...
If you accelerate at 1G for a little less than a year, you will be travelling pretty close to the speed of light. Add a year of deceleration plus the travel time and it should be physically feasible to travel a distance of 4 light years in between 5 and 7 years.
Obviously this would require propulsion technology that has not yet been developed, but may very well be not only feasible, but available within the next 100 years.
Safe high efficiency mass to energy conversion is required. e=mc2 tells us that reasonable amount of mass is more than capable of delivering the energy needed for acceleration. While the technology to convert mass directly to energy does not yet exist, one cannot rule out the possibility within the laws of physics as we know them.
Propellant is another matter and this would limit the size of the payload. Propellantless propulsion is a much better alternative. Although it's initially hard to believe possible, working models of such a thing do exist.
There are many other big problems to solve. For example, hitting even the tiniest grain of sand along the way would make for a very bad day so some kind of magic shield would be needed.
Using current technology such a trip would not be remotely feasible. We however don't need any crazy science fiction magic like warp drive or wormholes. We're like Jules Verne over a hundred years ago. He knew that a trip to the moon was feasible, but the only conceivable technology of his day was a big gun to shoot people there. We can travel to the stars within the limitations of the speed of light; we just don't have the details of the technology yet.
Most software is not fine art, it's a tool made by paid professionals for paid professionals. If there isn't a viable return on the investment made for maintenance and enhancement, the program will languish and die. Programs are not people a right to live and be cared for. Often the business decisions are faulty and software that is worthy of investment is ignored. These businesses are often not competitive and they die along with their creations. Sometimes a program's value only warrants a minimal maintenance investment. Admittedly, it's no fun doing a half-assed job, but sometimes you just have to hold your nose and do the minimum.
All too often business decision makers don't understand the tradeoffs and value of software maintenance. Equally, developers ignore the business aspect of their creations and cry for purity from their ivory tower for programs that do not warrant further Investment. Both camps have to learn to take the wider view.
I've learned to advise that when software is developed, a maintenance budget be crafted from the inception of the program and projected through the entire program's expected life. Having this planned in the beginning of a system's lifecycle promotes satisfaction, success, quality and long life.
My biggest problem is how they threw out the entire carefully curated universe in the novels. There is a huge rich and varied source of original ideas with complex moral dilemmas that many Star Wars fans are unaware of. What a shame they didn't use some of that instead of a rehash of the first Star Wars movie plot.
There is that magical structural integrity field. If the Enterprise in Generations can crash into a planet and have people walk away with nary a scratch, I figure what's a few atmospheres. Just sayin...
I stand corrected - you are correct. Wifi radio radiation is non-ionizing. I'm even less afraid than I was before :-)
My dad spent much of his career working next to a 50,000 watt AM radio transmitter. He would hold a fluorescent light near the transmission lines going out to the antenna array and it would light up in mid air. Neither he nor any of his colleagues experienced any ill effects including higher cancer rates. Granted, this is much lower frequency than wifi, which can potentially be ionizing. Based on this direct personal experience though fear of RF is largely irrational.
lol
It's not about Elon, its about the car and the people who make up the company. As a Tesla owner, I thought I'd respond to your comments.
1) They are taking the opportunity to do the right thing, check out every car for other issues, and getting great publicity. If they find one more car with an assembly problem like this, and however remotely possible that car is in an accident, this recall paid for itself.
2) It probably won't cost them anything at all because the techs are paid a salary and need something to do anyway. From our experience the cars require little maintenance.
3) OK
4A) The Model S is fairly priced for what it is; its not the car for everybody.
4B) The Model S has a 4 year Warranty with everything but tires covered. We paid another $3500 a year and a half ago to extend that to 8 years. This warranty policy makes 3rd party repair obsolete and I cannot think of another car of any kind that you can maintain for flat rate of $3500 for 8 years. I don't understand your point that maintenance on the Model S is expensive.
4C) You are correct; the Model S is a beta test of sorts. People who can afford a relatively expensive car are funding a business model that develops the capacity to make lower priced electric cars. Problems with any new technology is to be expected, but this one has been remarkably smooth for us. We got our Model S in April 2013 and I knew I was taking a pretty big chance. It paid off - we have had almost no trouble at all.
I'm pretty sure all Model S cars are still under the warranty that covers everything except tires. Also, I think they drive to where your car is parked to perform the service.
They are probably going to harvest deep sea metal nodules. This was a big thing back in the 70's but I don't think it ever got past the research stage. If all they are doing is harvesting the potato sized nodules from the surface of the sea floor, it may not be that big of an environmental disaster.
This article is incredibly short on details, but it's inconceivable that they would try to smelt the ore on the ocean floor. How they process the ore once on land is another matter, but we're already doing this with ore obtained on land so the environmental impacts are well understood.
On top of all that, communications can be encrypted with ssl so I'm not sure how router packet sniffing would be totally effective. They could easily use peer to peer technology to defeat any possible IP filtering strategy. Seriously, Microsoft could have the ultimate botnet tomorrow, but why would they do that?
Ignorance may be bliss, but from a information security standpoint, most of us place implicit trust in bios vendors, circuit board vendors and their firmware, Intel, AMD, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple and the list goes on. If any of these people really want your data they have the means to get it. If you think they aren't smart enough to hide their activity you're delusional. The fact is, our activity isn't really that interesting and these people aren't crooks so it's an acceptable risk.
If you run Windows you implicitly trust Microsoft. If you run Linux, you implicitly trust the open source movement. If Microsoft wants your data they have the means to get it. If for some reason they needed to hide that fact, nobody would likely know.
What I've noticed on the older processors that get hot is that the internal bond inside he device doesn't conduct heat as well and the processor goes into a death spiral of increasing temperature if it overheats. I've learned that monitoring the cpu temp and making sure it never gets too hot is critical. If you really want to milk a processor for 10 years (and I have servers older than that) an ounce of thermal prevention is worth a pound of cure.
It will start overheating before then...
The real improvement these days is low power, increased performance from ssd, faster i/o with new chip sets and faster memory with ddr4. Additionally, decent integrated graphics bring overall system cost down. Strictly looking at cpu benchmarks paints a darker picture that is really the case.
That said, i agree Moore's law seems to be on the ropes...
If the US constitution requires the federal government to be responsible for national defense, why wouldn't some of our defense money be spent on antibiotics and vaccines? If the free market is dropping the ball, it needs to get picked up in some way.
I got to thinking about this problem.The L1,2 and 3 cache on the CPU would largely mitigate this. The trend has been to increase the size of the on die CPU cache. Perhaps a vastly increased L3 cache in the gigabytes and a wear levelling non volatile ram controller would fully address this problem.
Damn, good point.
I guess we're back to VM until endurance can be addressed.
Using XPoint as a successor to mass storage in my mind is short term thinking. Maybe its a quick way to sell the technology in the near term, but certainly not the best use case.
We should get away from mass storage altogether and use this as replacement for RAM. It will take a rethinking of operating system structure, but promises to provide instant on computers with all programs and data always loaded and ready for immediate access. Database systems would immediately be orders of magnitude faster because all data is always ready for access.
I for one will not miss virtual memory...
There is a huge body of work of very well written Star Trek paperbacks. I hope they draw from that and maintain consistency.