Same could be said for the ubiquitous ferrite loop antennae used for AM broadcast reception. They are magnetic field devices that can be quite small (a few cm) compared to medium wave wavelengths of several hundred meters. They are great for reception, but pretty much useless for transmitting. They also have very narrow bandwidth,. have two very sharp nulls in their reception pattern, and work progressively more poorly as the frequency increases.
"And whether it works is exactly where my doubts lay:D."
Let's assume that it works. What advantage(s) does it have over an old-fashioned, non-nifty technology, helicopter?. Will it be cheaper, faster, safer, quieter, have a smaller footprint (with 10 meter wings? Seems like it might need some space on the ground)
BTW, if that "same as a Tesla" battery is the same as a Tesla 85kwh battery, it will weigh in around 540kg. And that's without framing members, controlling electronics, power cable, etc.
"Shitty 'self driving cars' will fail spectacularly in the marketplace once people truly understand the reality of them: your real freedom taken away,"
On the contrary. The problem is probably going to be that most drivers are going to find themselves in "manual mode" with minimal or no assistance from the vehicle much more of the time than they wish. I'm guessing that NOBODY wishes to deal with the Garden State Parkway or any of the I5-I405 splits-merges in Socal if the car can manage them. And those are things autonomous vehicles will likely be able to manage early on. OTOH, it's going to be a long time before autonomous vehicles can slog through heavy snow on a regional road with vehicles entering or exiting at cross roads and driveway cuts. Negotiating your average suburb safely even without snow is also going to be problemetic.
As for driving in Boston.... That may be beyond the capability of computers from now until the end of time.
OK then. Just epoxy your "smart key" someplace under the dash. But keep in mind that you'll need to replace the key battery every few years. Put the key someplace accessible. Then buy a mechanical ignition switch and cylinder for any older car, mount it on the dash, and graft in a bit of wiring to make it operate rationally.
Oh yeah, and one more "feature" of these moronic smart keys is that if the key's battery is tired and the key is left in the car in cold weather, you may have to somehow warm the key up before the vehicle will start. Yes, I've had that happen.
It's conceivable that the electronics for the Japanese version of the vehicle called a Previa in North America are not fully compatible with the tools an American dealer would use. I'd assume that the Japanese home island diagnostic tools have a Japanese language UI and that maybe some minor differences exist in the support programs and maybe even the ROMs as well. Doesn't matter if the differences are minor. They likely can effectively prevent a North American dealer from working on the some features of the electronics of a Japan configured vehicle.
Note that there can be differences (other than the Left hand steering) between a vehicle built in Japan for the Japanese market and a vehicle built in Japan for the North American market.
"something hardware stores used to do for around three or four bucks."
And something the hardware stores will still do for older models that lack the nifty "features" of modern cars. Things like... well, I can't think of many. You can add an aftermarket backup camera and a radio that does GPS, will play mp3s and can talk to your smartphone for maybe $150 plus maybe $100 or $150 labor if you don't fancy soldering a few wires. Threading the video feed for the camera can be a drag. But you can pay someone to do that also.
Big numbers. Don't believe them for a minute. I'm told that while some of the older pilots for big airlines get impressive paychecks, pilots for regional airlines and new pilots for some of the established airlines barely make a living wage. Less than $40 an hour in some cases and only for the hours they are actually in the cockpit.
Incidentally, one might ask why the cargo carriers, Fed Ex, UPS, et al haven't gotten rid of their pilots. If we're seriously thinking about getting rid of pilots, let's automate the cargo carriers first and wait a decade or so to see how that works out.
Of course you can have a cockpit seat. There will, after all, be fourteen seats -- each 15 inches (43cm) wide with a full 24 inches (61cm) of legroom crammed in up there. Or for 20% less you can have one of the seven overhead perches where you hang upside down like a bat.
That's correct, but the North American coastal plain South of New York City is pretty flat all the way to Miami. The single exception that comes to mind are the New Jersey Palisades -- a precipitous 100-200 meter high Triassic lava flow on the West bank of the Hudson River. But that's very near the New York terminus and taking it at a slower speed than the rest of the trip probably would not seem out of line to passengers. .
All valid points. The median strip of I-95 is probably usable for hyperloop for most of the journey from NYC to Washington -- with a few substantial engineering problems getting across three major rivers (technically, their flooded estuaries). a good sized hill in a seriously urban area on the West bank of the Hudson, etc, etc, etc.
None the less, I doubt it'll happen. Probably not enough people want to get from Washington to NYC in minutes to pay for the infrastructure to do so.... And surely HSR on the existing rights of way would be much cheaper and not all that much slower.
Aside from which, the NYC-Washington DC proposal is for a tunnel, not an above ground tube. Temps underground at any depth sufficient to miss sewers, data cables, water mains, old basements, etc, etc, etc are pretty stable.
I'm a little surprised that musk doesn't seem to have anticipated the regulatory issue. More important, he doesn't seem to be familiar with Seattle's tunneling effort in its attempt to replace the Alaska Way Viaduct. That (expensive) project is WAY over budget and WAY late due largely to encountering a steel pipe where it didn't expect one. The pipe broke the boring machine which then required a secondary hole/tunnel be drilled to get access to the damaged machinery. Boring tunnels in modern urban areas is a lot more complex than folks (including Musk?) think.
The other big relatively recent urban tunneling effort in the US was Boston's Big Dig which also was way late and way over budget. I think it was a "dig a huge ditch, put a transportation tube at the bottom then fill over it operation" not a tunnel bore. But here's a quote from Wikipedia.
In addition to political and financial difficulties, the project faced several environmental and engineering obstacles. The downtown area through which the tunnels were to be dug was largely landfill, and included existing Red Line and Blue Line subway tunnels as well as innumerable pipes and utility lines that would have to be replaced or moved. Tunnel workers encountered many unexpected geological and archaeological barriers, ranging from glacial debris to foundations of buried houses and a number of sunken ships lying within the reclaimed land.
Tunneling through urban areas does not seem to be a project for the faint of heart.
In the meantime, you'll just have to limp along using the mundane, old-rechargeable alkaline batteries that have been available for about half a century. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I think the post ruled that out. No desire to distribute TV
Still though, if the coax isn't an eyesore and one isn't the sort of freak that thinks fishing cables through walls and overheads is fun, I'd leave the coax. It may turn out that in 5 or 10 or 20 years there will be a need to send a few volts of DC or a low speed digital or analog signal to one of the places that the coax terminates. The RG-59 will be the "wrong" kind of wire to use of course. But it'll likely work.
They would will fine if you spend two days penetrating the packaging and can manage to glue everything back together afterwards. So they are perfectly functional.
Does anyone ever stop to think how loud and long our descendants (if any) a century from now are going to laugh at how we did things in the early 21st century?. Not that they won't have their own set of completely demented approaches to managing things.
Have you considered the disastrous economic consequences of not constantly updating everything? The software business would end up like the unix GNU utilities -- stable, functional, boring, and -- above all -- unprofitable.
Rule of thumb: Moving from 32 bits to 64 bits will double the bandwidth, quadruple the bugs, and increase complexity by a factor of eight.
The Red Queen races on. You all better get cracking if you hope to keep up.
Me? I'm retired and I'm still trying to figure out stuff that was released 30 years ago.
Where has all MY cpu gone? Ironically, about three hours ago, I noticed that my PC seemed sluggish. Fired up top. Opera is taking 25-30% of the cpu. What's Opera looking at? You guessed it, Slashdot. Killed the Slasdot tab. Opera usage dropped to under 1%.
Tesla is working on an autonomous vehicle because Ford and GM and Toyota and Honda and VW and Fiat are working on autonomous vehicles. If Tesla doesn't develop their own technology they'll have to buy the technology elsewhere. And what they buy may not really suit Tesla's needs.
One suspects that Musk is not happy with the state of autonomous vehicle technology or the directions it is going in.
Keep in mind that a car or truck is a 1500kg self propelled missile. It is potentially quite lethal even without an explosive payload. It doesn't really have to have lethal intentions to be a menace and doesn't have to be malicious to be dangerous.
"A worm has roughly the "intelligence" of a vending machine (if (coin entered && button pressed): push_out(coke))"
That's roughly the same level of intelligence displayed by many utilities (e.g. Comcast), a lot of civil servants, and a significant number of elected representatives. Just because an entity isn't real bright doesn't mean it's not dangerous.
Exactly. And that's fine if your black box can usually tell a $50 banknote printed by the government from one printed by an enterprising teenager. That's useful even if you don't know exactly how the box works. OTOH, you may not want a similar box trying to steer your new car through Boston traffic. I, at least, would like more than a little determinism in the algorithms controlling how my car gets from Point A to Point B,
I'm not all that big a fan of Elon Musk. But I gather all he wants is some regulation of AI deployment. And considering the shambles that the folks in Silicon Valley have made of the Internet it's hard not agree that some adult supervision would be appropriate when those clowns start working with potentially lethal hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
"Soo there really will be voices in my head?"
Only until the non-replaceable battery dies (or explodes).
"It was very good for receiving'
Same could be said for the ubiquitous ferrite loop antennae used for AM broadcast reception. They are magnetic field devices that can be quite small (a few cm) compared to medium wave wavelengths of several hundred meters. They are great for reception, but pretty much useless for transmitting. They also have very narrow bandwidth,. have two very sharp nulls in their reception pattern, and work progressively more poorly as the frequency increases.
"And whether it works is exactly where my doubts lay :D."
Let's assume that it works. What advantage(s) does it have over an old-fashioned, non-nifty technology, helicopter?. Will it be cheaper, faster, safer, quieter, have a smaller footprint (with 10 meter wings? Seems like it might need some space on the ground)
BTW, if that "same as a Tesla" battery is the same as a Tesla 85kwh battery, it will weigh in around 540kg. And that's without framing members, controlling electronics, power cable, etc.
540kg is heavier than 5 Americans.
"Shitty 'self driving cars' will fail spectacularly in the marketplace once people truly understand the reality of them: your real freedom taken away,"
On the contrary. The problem is probably going to be that most drivers are going to find themselves in "manual mode" with minimal or no assistance from the vehicle much more of the time than they wish. I'm guessing that NOBODY wishes to deal with the Garden State Parkway or any of the I5-I405 splits-merges in Socal if the car can manage them. And those are things autonomous vehicles will likely be able to manage early on. OTOH, it's going to be a long time before autonomous vehicles can slog through heavy snow on a regional road with vehicles entering or exiting at cross roads and driveway cuts. Negotiating your average suburb safely even without snow is also going to be problemetic.
As for driving in Boston .... That may be beyond the capability of computers from now until the end of time.
OK then. Just epoxy your "smart key" someplace under the dash. But keep in mind that you'll need to replace the key battery every few years. Put the key someplace accessible. Then buy a mechanical ignition switch and cylinder for any older car, mount it on the dash, and graft in a bit of wiring to make it operate rationally.
Oh yeah, and one more "feature" of these moronic smart keys is that if the key's battery is tired and the key is left in the car in cold weather, you may have to somehow warm the key up before the vehicle will start. Yes, I've had that happen.
It's conceivable that the electronics for the Japanese version of the vehicle called a Previa in North America are not fully compatible with the tools an American dealer would use. I'd assume that the Japanese home island diagnostic tools have a Japanese language UI and that maybe some minor differences exist in the support programs and maybe even the ROMs as well. Doesn't matter if the differences are minor. They likely can effectively prevent a North American dealer from working on the some features of the electronics of a Japan configured vehicle.
Note that there can be differences (other than the Left hand steering) between a vehicle built in Japan for the Japanese market and a vehicle built in Japan for the North American market.
"something hardware stores used to do for around three or four bucks."
And something the hardware stores will still do for older models that lack the nifty "features" of modern cars. Things like ... well, I can't think of many. You can add an aftermarket backup camera and a radio that does GPS, will play mp3s and can talk to your smartphone for maybe $150 plus maybe $100 or $150 labor if you don't fancy soldering a few wires. Threading the video feed for the camera can be a drag. But you can pay someone to do that also.
Big numbers. Don't believe them for a minute. I'm told that while some of the older pilots for big airlines get impressive paychecks, pilots for regional airlines and new pilots for some of the established airlines barely make a living wage. Less than $40 an hour in some cases and only for the hours they are actually in the cockpit.
Incidentally, one might ask why the cargo carriers, Fed Ex, UPS, et al haven't gotten rid of their pilots. If we're seriously thinking about getting rid of pilots, let's automate the cargo carriers first and wait a decade or so to see how that works out.
Of course you can have a cockpit seat. There will, after all, be fourteen seats -- each 15 inches (43cm) wide with a full 24 inches (61cm) of legroom crammed in up there. Or for 20% less you can have one of the seven overhead perches where you hang upside down like a bat.
That's correct, but the North American coastal plain South of New York City is pretty flat all the way to Miami. The single exception that comes to mind are the New Jersey Palisades -- a precipitous 100-200 meter high Triassic lava flow on the West bank of the Hudson River. But that's very near the New York terminus and taking it at a slower speed than the rest of the trip probably would not seem out of line to passengers. .
All valid points. The median strip of I-95 is probably usable for hyperloop for most of the journey from NYC to Washington -- with a few substantial engineering problems getting across three major rivers (technically, their flooded estuaries). a good sized hill in a seriously urban area on the West bank of the Hudson, etc, etc, etc.
None the less, I doubt it'll happen. Probably not enough people want to get from Washington to NYC in minutes to pay for the infrastructure to do so. ... And surely HSR on the existing rights of way would be much cheaper and not all that much slower.
Aside from which, the NYC-Washington DC proposal is for a tunnel, not an above ground tube. Temps underground at any depth sufficient to miss sewers, data cables, water mains, old basements, etc, etc, etc are pretty stable.
I'm a little surprised that musk doesn't seem to have anticipated the regulatory issue. More important, he doesn't seem to be familiar with Seattle's tunneling effort in its attempt to replace the Alaska Way Viaduct. That (expensive) project is WAY over budget and WAY late due largely to encountering a steel pipe where it didn't expect one. The pipe broke the boring machine which then required a secondary hole/tunnel be drilled to get access to the damaged machinery. Boring tunnels in modern urban areas is a lot more complex than folks (including Musk?) think.
The other big relatively recent urban tunneling effort in the US was Boston's Big Dig which also was way late and way over budget. I think it was a "dig a huge ditch, put a transportation tube at the bottom then fill over it operation" not a tunnel bore. But here's a quote from Wikipedia.
Tunneling through urban areas does not seem to be a project for the faint of heart.
In the meantime, you'll just have to limp along using the mundane, old-rechargeable alkaline batteries that have been available for about half a century. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Because there's no such thing as "free money"?"
Of course there is such a thing as free money, but it's generally the folks pushing the scheme who end up with it.
I find your lack of faith disturbing -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I think the post ruled that out. No desire to distribute TV
Still though, if the coax isn't an eyesore and one isn't the sort of freak that thinks fishing cables through walls and overheads is fun, I'd leave the coax. It may turn out that in 5 or 10 or 20 years there will be a need to send a few volts of DC or a low speed digital or analog signal to one of the places that the coax terminates. The RG-59 will be the "wrong" kind of wire to use of course. But it'll likely work.
Fair warning. Revealing that you actually know something about the subject being discussed may not be prudent.
(And yes, you're correct.)
Well, yeah. But how are you gonna do all that with a bunch of RG-59?
They would will fine if you spend two days penetrating the packaging and can manage to glue everything back together afterwards. So they are perfectly functional.
Does anyone ever stop to think how loud and long our descendants (if any) a century from now are going to laugh at how we did things in the early 21st century?. Not that they won't have their own set of completely demented approaches to managing things.
Have you considered the disastrous economic consequences of not constantly updating everything? The software business would end up like the unix GNU utilities -- stable, functional, boring, and -- above all -- unprofitable.
Rule of thumb: Moving from 32 bits to 64 bits will double the bandwidth, quadruple the bugs, and increase complexity by a factor of eight.
The Red Queen races on. You all better get cracking if you hope to keep up.
Me? I'm retired and I'm still trying to figure out stuff that was released 30 years ago.
Where has all MY cpu gone? Ironically, about three hours ago, I noticed that my PC seemed sluggish. Fired up top. Opera is taking 25-30% of the cpu. What's Opera looking at? You guessed it, Slashdot. Killed the Slasdot tab. Opera usage dropped to under 1%.
Tesla is working on an autonomous vehicle because Ford and GM and Toyota and Honda and VW and Fiat are working on autonomous vehicles. If Tesla doesn't develop their own technology they'll have to buy the technology elsewhere. And what they buy may not really suit Tesla's needs.
One suspects that Musk is not happy with the state of autonomous vehicle technology or the directions it is going in.
Keep in mind that a car or truck is a 1500kg self propelled missile. It is potentially quite lethal even without an explosive payload. It doesn't really have to have lethal intentions to be a menace and doesn't have to be malicious to be dangerous.
"A worm has roughly the "intelligence" of a vending machine (if (coin entered && button pressed): push_out(coke))"
That's roughly the same level of intelligence displayed by many utilities (e.g. Comcast), a lot of civil servants, and a significant number of elected representatives. Just because an entity isn't real bright doesn't mean it's not dangerous.
Exactly. And that's fine if your black box can usually tell a $50 banknote printed by the government from one printed by an enterprising teenager. That's useful even if you don't know exactly how the box works. OTOH, you may not want a similar box trying to steer your new car through Boston traffic. I, at least, would like more than a little determinism in the algorithms controlling how my car gets from Point A to Point B,
I'm not all that big a fan of Elon Musk. But I gather all he wants is some regulation of AI deployment. And considering the shambles that the folks in Silicon Valley have made of the Internet it's hard not agree that some adult supervision would be appropriate when those clowns start working with potentially lethal hardware.