> There's very little confusing road signage in the US; if you know it in one place, you know it everywhere.
Sadly, that turns out not to be quite true. There's a code. But not everyone complies with it. And when it changes many traffic control devices aren't redone to code until they need to be upgraded for some reason. Moreover, it's common practice to modify the normal rules with signs. I'm far from sure that's going to work with autonomous vehicles unless there are rules about sign size, placement, wordage, etc.
When I hit Google to make sure I wasn't dead wrong, I found that there used to be, and maybe still is, at least one place in California where a blinking red left turn arrow meant that -- if you can believe this -- a train is approaching the grade level crossing on the street you are contemplating turning into.
> How long do you think before every automated car on the road is submitting data on speeding, illegal lane changes
Let me get this straight. My car is driving itself and it is speeding and making illegal lane changes? Hold on while I call my lawyer -- I smell a class-action suit here.
Only question is who do I sue -- the manufacturer, the dealer, the software mongers... what the hell... this is America. We'll sue them all.
Maybe. Someone telling lawmakers about the needs for uniform, computer (and human) readable road signage, consistent traffic signals (what the hell does a blinking red left arrow mean? And does it mean the same thing in Michigan as in British Columbia?) and similar issues is almost certainly a good thing.
But if these folks devote their efforts to self serving legislation to limit competition or to sacrifice safety for profits, then it's not such a good thing.
> Really? Because what I read is $44M in a multi trillion dollar energy industry suggests that behind the meter storage is a niche market at best, and a small one.
Yes and no. In the lower 48, it's largely confined to a small number of people living beyond the reach of the power grid, a few eccentrics, and victims of poorly thought out "green" policies. Hawaii, however is a special case being 4000km from any source of hydrocarbon fuels. Residential electricity rates on Oahu are over 25 cents per kw/hr and on the outlying islands are pushing 40 cents. https://www.hawaiianelectric.c...
Seems to me like a great testbed for rooftop solar with on-site storage and similar renewable based technologies.
Then there's California which seems to be determined to test renewables on a large scale. Nice of them to do so assuming that the rest of us are capable of learning from their experience -- good or bad. They may be able to make it work as they have a favorable situation for grid scale solar as well as hydro and a significant percentage (about 25%) of the world's actual up an running grid-scale geothermal generation.
Personally, I think Hawaii might do OK eventually although probably not 100% renewable. There's some stuff -- aircraft, emergency vehicles, etc that probably work best with liquid fuels.
California? Iffy, I think. But I don't live there. And they aren't all gonna die if their experiment founders.
"It reacts reversibly with water (in your blood) to produce carbonic acid"
Apparently not. CO2 in the blood is transferred as bicarbonate HCO3- not carbonate CO3--. The transfer is between CO2 and bicarbonate is done by red blood cells in the lungs. i.e. Atmospheric CO2 doesn't interface dirrectly to and dissolve in blood (at least not to any great extent)?
Not that it's clear that there's no problem. For one thing there's the issue of where the O and H in the bicarbonate come from. If it's from water, there's a missing H+ ion that has to be somewhere in the system. Also, the greater the CO2 in the incoming air one would think the harder the job of the lung blood cells to expel CO2 from blood bicarbonate?
It's really hard to tell how toxic CO2 is. Healthy adults can tolerate a lot of it in environments like submarines. It looks like the values for Lethal Concetration (90,000ppm), Recommended Exposure Limit (5000ppm), etc are more WAGs than anything definitive. Some people react to CO2 at lower values than the REL (as low as 2000 ppm IIRC) but they don't curl up on the floor and die or anything like that. It'd probably be useful to know the lowest level that the most susceptible individuals can tolerate continuously without damage.
Maybe it's just me, but my feeling is that objects are like salt. A little can do wonders for a bland food product. Too many can be worse than none at all. Having all file type objects behave the save and provide the same interface makes Python very easy to use -- when dealing with filish sorts of things. Defining new object types with new (often poorly described) interfaces just adds another layer of obscurity to the coding process.
BTW, it seems to me that one of Python's virtues is that it supports a variety of programming styles -- procedural, object oriented, functional -- pretty well.
But what do I know? I'm old. And no longer smart. And I was never a very good programmer anyway.
Same language pretty much. The difference being that if you have to look at your code six weeks later, you have some chance of being able to figure out what the Python code does.
Why 2M lines? At a guess, core functionality is a few thousand lines or maybe a few tens of thousands of lines. Plus a LOT of management software -- report generators, collecting garbage at the application level, etc, etc,etc, . And it has to talk to its users through HTML which has a lot of virtues, but is extraordinarily klunky at times. It does probably email. And it replicates ftp sorta? It distributes work over a vast complex of servers. It presumably does billing, and payments, and all that stuff -- 500 million users is a few more than I'd entrust Intuit's off the shelf software to do. (Actually, 1 account may be more than I'd trust to Intuit). And it tries to be secure which means you can multiply the complexity of even the simplest undertaking by a factor of about seven.
It's not an example of switching "from fossil fuels toward innovative clean energy". It's an example of switching from an inefficient heating technology (electrical resistance heating) to a more efficient heating technology (refrigeration). Presumably the energy source is still fossil fuels because they likely want to heat the place on days and nights when the wind isn't blowing (not much solar at 60N in December).
It's also an example of wildly inaccurate reporting. But you can find wildly inaccurate reporting in virtually every article about anything nowadays.
I think your dream home might work well in arid climates. In humid regions, I fear that mold would be a huge issue, Also, unless you build on a steep hillside with services available on a road below you, you are probably going to have to pump waste uphill to a sewer. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Heat Pollution? In San Francisco? Typical weather in much of the city is low overcast, 60F(16C) with wind and fog or even light drizzle. But how well will solar panels work under the near perpetual marine layer? Badly I should think. Won't that be a problem? Could be..
Here's an English site from the Fukushima-ken tourist folks. http://www.tif.ne.jp/lang/en/r... I'm not sure that it's a reliable source. My bet would be otherwise. But it may be better than the silly numberless photoshoot the article links to. It does have some comparative numbers. If you believe them, the background counts in Rotterdam (0.33 us/h) are ten times those in Tokyo(0.03 us/h)
> Hearing aids that let you understand women? Sign me up!
Your reaction is understandable, but I believe there's a 48 hour mandatory cooling off period to allow you to think through the possible consequences of what might prove to be an irrevokable action.
> A lot of the "consumer devices" nowadays have very poor audio quality.
No kidding. And we're not just talking about faithfully reproducing sounds dogs can't hear and other stuff of interest only to audio fanatics. I have no trouble at all understanding sound on AM radio and over our four decade old analog landline. Both of those have quite restricted bandwidth. But a lot of digital phones do truly ghastly things to the human voice.
> Hearing aid manufacturers say that diagnosing and treating hearing loss is too complex for consumers to do using consumer devices, without the aid of a professional.
Aging ears tend to lose response to different frequencies at different rates. (presbycusis) The expensive earphones try to tailor the audio response to match an individual's specific hearing loss pattern. Some folks may actually need that. It's far from clear to me that a simple tone and volume control pair of controls wouldn't be more than adequate for a lot of us elderly.folks.
Not too good at economics, eh? Try some modeling on a cocktail napkin sometime. You'll quickly find that the the critical factors in this situation are probably charging time and capex (capital expense) -- how long does it take to pay off the investment in a charger?
I'm not against electric vehicles BTW, but their capabilities and limitations are going to be different from hydrocarbon based vehicles for a long time. Electric (and NG) look to be good for fleet vehicles driving predictable routes and probably for vehicles that rarely/never. travel all that far from home. Electric is better in warm climates than cold -- current batteries behave better when warm and also at -25C (-13F) the waste heat from an IC engine is welcome. I also have some doubts about the wisdom of electric powered emergency vehicles. It's not a bad idea for ambulances and fire equipment to continue running even if the grid has failed.
"The Tesla already does this in under an hour."... If the winds are fair and the force is with you. More like 4 or 5 hours at a typical public charger. Or a day or so if you are charging off someone's household circuitry.
"So a 20 hour drive becomes 25 hours."
Or maybe 25 days. Do you have any idea what the lines waiting for a charger are going to look like on holiday weekends? And what happens if the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing on one of those "migration days." Where is all that electricity going to come from?
If you have enough chargers to serve everyone passing through, what's electricity going to cost? You'll have to pay off the investment in all that rarely used hardware in just a few days a year of usage. Probably going to cost a great many Euros to fully charge your battery at say two Euros per KW/hr.
Earthquakes?. It's not too hard to predict where some large earthquakes will occur. In the US, future large quakes on the New Madrid, San Andreas, and Cascadia fault systems are a near certainty. It's when that's the problem. Could be centuries... or hours.
And, of course, serious quakes can occur on other faults -- probably including some fault zones that we aren't currently aware of.
It's sort of like predicting hurricanes in the Southeastern US. Are there going to be hurricanes? Always have been. On average one or two in any three year period although it's been 10 years since the last one (Wilma-2005) No reason to think that there won't be hurricanes in the future. How many will hit Florida next year? And where? And how strong? No one will have the slightest idea until a few days before one strikes.
> I can't wait for the DevOps movement to die a quiet death,
If I were you, I'd wait to see what replaces DevOps You may well end up looking back on the good old days of DevOps.
Being long since retired, I have no experience with the DevOps concept. It sounds pretty bizzare. I suspect that any organization that found it appealing will buy into most any magic based development scheme.
"just to clarify: those self-driving truck were just following the truck in front of them at rather close distance, about 10m. The first truck in those so-called platoons was manually driven, the second, and possibly third and fourth follower however was following on autopilot"
That's what it sounded like to me, but it sounded like they were slipstreaming closer than 10 meters. Frankly, it sounds quite hazardous and somewhat pointless unless you take the drivers out of the trailing vehicles. In which case the driver in the front truck can occupy his or her spare time while cruising down the expressway wondering about what could possibly go wrong.
I think perhaps they are viewing this as a step toward a world where, for example, chargers are buried under bus stops and when a bus stops to load/unload passengers, it also takes on a load of electrons. Chances of that eventually working once about 50 other problems are solved? Who the hell knows? Not terribly high probably, but clearly not zero.
Probably a better investment than an F-35. And much cheaper too.
Slashdot Mirror
> There's very little confusing road signage in the US; if you know it in one place, you know it everywhere.
Sadly, that turns out not to be quite true. There's a code. But not everyone complies with it. And when it changes many traffic control devices aren't redone to code until they need to be upgraded for some reason. Moreover, it's common practice to modify the normal rules with signs. I'm far from sure that's going to work with autonomous vehicles unless there are rules about sign size, placement, wordage, etc.
When I hit Google to make sure I wasn't dead wrong, I found that there used to be, and maybe still is, at least one place in California where a blinking red left turn arrow meant that -- if you can believe this -- a train is approaching the grade level crossing on the street you are contemplating turning into.
> How long do you think before every automated car on the road is submitting data on speeding, illegal lane changes
Let me get this straight. My car is driving itself and it is speeding and making illegal lane changes? Hold on while I call my lawyer -- I smell a class-action suit here.
Only question is who do I sue -- the manufacturer, the dealer, the software mongers ... what the hell ... this is America. We'll sue them all.
> Yes, and that is a good thing.
Maybe. Someone telling lawmakers about the needs for uniform, computer (and human) readable road signage, consistent traffic signals (what the hell does a blinking red left arrow mean? And does it mean the same thing in Michigan as in British Columbia?) and similar issues is almost certainly a good thing.
But if these folks devote their efforts to self serving legislation to limit competition or to sacrifice safety for profits, then it's not such a good thing.
Time will tell.
> Really? Because what I read is $44M in a multi trillion dollar energy industry suggests that behind the meter storage is a niche market at best, and a small one.
Yes and no. In the lower 48, it's largely confined to a small number of people living beyond the reach of the power grid, a few eccentrics, and victims of poorly thought out "green" policies. Hawaii, however is a special case being 4000km from any source of hydrocarbon fuels. Residential electricity rates on Oahu are over 25 cents per kw/hr and on the outlying islands are pushing 40 cents. https://www.hawaiianelectric.c...
Seems to me like a great testbed for rooftop solar with on-site storage and similar renewable based technologies.
Then there's California which seems to be determined to test renewables on a large scale. Nice of them to do so assuming that the rest of us are capable of learning from their experience -- good or bad. They may be able to make it work as they have a favorable situation for grid scale solar as well as hydro and a significant percentage (about 25%) of the world's actual up an running grid-scale geothermal generation.
Personally, I think Hawaii might do OK eventually although probably not 100% renewable. There's some stuff -- aircraft, emergency vehicles, etc that probably work best with liquid fuels.
California? Iffy, I think. But I don't live there. And they aren't all gonna die if their experiment founders.
"It reacts reversibly with water (in your blood) to produce carbonic acid"
Apparently not. CO2 in the blood is transferred as bicarbonate HCO3- not carbonate CO3--. The transfer is between CO2 and bicarbonate is done by red blood cells in the lungs. i.e. Atmospheric CO2 doesn't interface dirrectly to and dissolve in blood (at least not to any great extent)?
Not that it's clear that there's no problem. For one thing there's the issue of where the O and H in the bicarbonate come from. If it's from water, there's a missing H+ ion that has to be somewhere in the system. Also, the greater the CO2 in the incoming air one would think the harder the job of the lung blood cells to expel CO2 from blood bicarbonate?
It's really hard to tell how toxic CO2 is. Healthy adults can tolerate a lot of it in environments like submarines. It looks like the values for Lethal Concetration (90,000ppm), Recommended Exposure Limit (5000ppm), etc are more WAGs than anything definitive. Some people react to CO2 at lower values than the REL (as low as 2000 ppm IIRC) but they don't curl up on the floor and die or anything like that. It'd probably be useful to know the lowest level that the most susceptible individuals can tolerate continuously without damage.
Maybe it's just me, but my feeling is that objects are like salt. A little can do wonders for a bland food product. Too many can be worse than none at all. Having all file type objects behave the save and provide the same interface makes Python very easy to use -- when dealing with filish sorts of things. Defining new object types with new (often poorly described) interfaces just adds another layer of obscurity to the coding process.
BTW, it seems to me that one of Python's virtues is that it supports a variety of programming styles -- procedural, object oriented, functional -- pretty well.
But what do I know? I'm old. And no longer smart. And I was never a very good programmer anyway.
> We're talking about python, not perl.
Same language pretty much. The difference being that if you have to look at your code six weeks later, you have some chance of being able to figure out what the Python code does.
Why 2M lines? At a guess, core functionality is a few thousand lines or maybe a few tens of thousands of lines. Plus a LOT of management software -- report generators, collecting garbage at the application level, etc, etc,etc, . And it has to talk to its users through HTML which has a lot of virtues, but is extraordinarily klunky at times. It does probably email. And it replicates ftp sorta? It distributes work over a vast complex of servers. It presumably does billing, and payments, and all that stuff -- 500 million users is a few more than I'd entrust Intuit's off the shelf software to do. (Actually, 1 account may be more than I'd trust to Intuit). And it tries to be secure which means you can multiply the complexity of even the simplest undertaking by a factor of about seven.
But you're right. 2M lines is a lot of code.
It's not an example of switching "from fossil fuels toward innovative clean energy". It's an example of switching from an inefficient heating technology (electrical resistance heating) to a more efficient heating technology (refrigeration). Presumably the energy source is still fossil fuels because they likely want to heat the place on days and nights when the wind isn't blowing (not much solar at 60N in December).
It's also an example of wildly inaccurate reporting. But you can find wildly inaccurate reporting in virtually every article about anything nowadays.
I think your dream home might work well in arid climates. In humid regions, I fear that mold would be a huge issue, Also, unless you build on a steep hillside with services available on a road below you, you are probably going to have to pump waste uphill to a sewer. What could possibly go wrong with that?
"What about heat pollution?"
Heat Pollution? In San Francisco? Typical weather in much of the city is low overcast, 60F(16C) with wind and fog or even light drizzle. But how well will solar panels work under the near perpetual marine layer? Badly I should think. Won't that be a problem? Could be..
But that's someone else's problem, not mine.
Here's an English site from the Fukushima-ken tourist folks. http://www.tif.ne.jp/lang/en/r... I'm not sure that it's a reliable source. My bet would be otherwise. But it may be better than the silly numberless photoshoot the article links to. It does have some comparative numbers. If you believe them, the background counts in Rotterdam (0.33 us/h) are ten times those in Tokyo(0.03 us/h)
> Hearing aids that let you understand women? Sign me up!
Your reaction is understandable, but I believe there's a 48 hour mandatory cooling off period to allow you to think through the possible consequences of what might prove to be an irrevokable action.
> A lot of the "consumer devices" nowadays have very poor audio quality.
No kidding. And we're not just talking about faithfully reproducing sounds dogs can't hear and other stuff of interest only to audio fanatics. I have no trouble at all understanding sound on AM radio and over our four decade old analog landline. Both of those have quite restricted bandwidth. But a lot of digital phones do truly ghastly things to the human voice.
> Hearing aid manufacturers say that diagnosing and treating hearing loss is too complex for consumers to do using consumer devices, without the aid of a professional.
To slightly mis-paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies "Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Aging ears tend to lose response to different frequencies at different rates. (presbycusis) The expensive earphones try to tailor the audio response to match an individual's specific hearing loss pattern. Some folks may actually need that. It's far from clear to me that a simple tone and volume control pair of controls wouldn't be more than adequate for a lot of us elderly.folks.
Not too good at economics, eh? Try some modeling on a cocktail napkin sometime. You'll quickly find that the the critical factors in this situation are probably charging time and capex (capital expense) -- how long does it take to pay off the investment in a charger?
I'm not against electric vehicles BTW, but their capabilities and limitations are going to be different from hydrocarbon based vehicles for a long time. Electric (and NG) look to be good for fleet vehicles driving predictable routes and probably for vehicles that rarely/never. travel all that far from home. Electric is better in warm climates than cold -- current batteries behave better when warm and also at -25C (-13F) the waste heat from an IC engine is welcome. I also have some doubts about the wisdom of electric powered emergency vehicles. It's not a bad idea for ambulances and fire equipment to continue running even if the grid has failed.
"The Tesla already does this in under an hour." ... If the winds are fair and the force is with you. More like 4 or 5 hours at a typical public charger. Or a day or so if you are charging off someone's household circuitry.
"So a 20 hour drive becomes 25 hours."
Or maybe 25 days. Do you have any idea what the lines waiting for a charger are going to look like on holiday weekends? And what happens if the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing on one of those "migration days." Where is all that electricity going to come from?
If you have enough chargers to serve everyone passing through, what's electricity going to cost? You'll have to pay off the investment in all that rarely used hardware in just a few days a year of usage. Probably going to cost a great many Euros to fully charge your battery at say two Euros per KW/hr.
Earthquakes?. It's not too hard to predict where some large earthquakes will occur. In the US, future large quakes on the New Madrid, San Andreas, and Cascadia fault systems are a near certainty. It's when that's the problem. Could be centuries ... or hours.
And, of course, serious quakes can occur on other faults -- probably including some fault zones that we aren't currently aware of.
It's sort of like predicting hurricanes in the Southeastern US. Are there going to be hurricanes? Always have been. On average one or two in any three year period although it's been 10 years since the last one (Wilma-2005) No reason to think that there won't be hurricanes in the future. How many will hit Florida next year? And where? And how strong? No one will have the slightest idea until a few days before one strikes.
Maybe you can use the hoverboard exhaust to bake your own bread.
> I can't wait for the DevOps movement to die a quiet death,
If I were you, I'd wait to see what replaces DevOps You may well end up looking back on the good old days of DevOps.
Being long since retired, I have no experience with the DevOps concept. It sounds pretty bizzare. I suspect that any organization that found it appealing will buy into most any magic based development scheme.
"just to clarify: those self-driving truck were just following the truck in front of them at rather close distance, about 10m. The first truck in those so-called platoons was manually driven, the second, and possibly third and fourth follower however was following on autopilot"
That's what it sounded like to me, but it sounded like they were slipstreaming closer than 10 meters. Frankly, it sounds quite hazardous and somewhat pointless unless you take the drivers out of the trailing vehicles. In which case the driver in the front truck can occupy his or her spare time while cruising down the expressway wondering about what could possibly go wrong.
> However, rail can never match the speed and
> flexibility of trucks to make smaller point-to-point
> deliveries.
True enough. But for that sort of traffic, don't the drivers often/usually unload the trucks?
> What a waste of our tax dollars.
I think perhaps they are viewing this as a step toward a world where, for example, chargers are buried under bus stops and when a bus stops to load/unload passengers, it also takes on a load of electrons. Chances of that eventually working once about 50 other problems are solved? Who the hell knows? Not terribly high probably, but clearly not zero.
Probably a better investment than an F-35. And much cheaper too.