Tesla opened up their patents but I doubt current non-Tesla electric cars can actually be charged by them without over-heating.
I also doubt they will just let anyone use their superchargers because they are currently paying the power bill... but you'd have to be on the pay from some dubious source to turn this fact into anti-tesla spin.
ah so china has a cavalier attitude to safety in coal mines. this also happens to make up a large percentage of the deaths worldwide attributable to coal. china is now rolling out nuke plants. as we've seen previously with high speed rail and coal mines, there will be a cavalier attitude to safety.
my prediction is the outcome will be an increase in the number of deaths due to nuclear power.
(no, you don't avoid all deaths with hydro, wind or solar either; in fact hydro has historically been one of the deadliest power sources thanks to the Banqiao accident where a dam failure killed 171,000 - even excluding that, though, hydro is far from free of deaths)
EDIT: Since I was being a bit snarky: The point is last I heard the number of deaths from installation of rooftop solar is higher than the number of deaths from nuclear power plants for equivalent amount of energy. Nuclear gets the headlines because the nuclear incidents we hear about are big and scary and rare and get hyped up.
You don't get massive worldwide news coverage because some guy fell off a roof while mounting solar panels and died. But he's just as dead, and it adds up.
You can't ignore the small incidents if their rate is high enough.
Overall, you could have meltdowns on a regular basis and nuclear would still be one of our safest alternatives. Chances are it will also be one of the alternatives with the lowest environmental impact: Less radioactivity released than coal, by orders of magnitude; far less land area affected by development than hydro, wind and solar.
I had always heard it as thirty years. The ten year estimate seems to be a newer development! (My guess is that fusion is becoming less theoretical and shifting into an engineering problem; still hard, but a bit more deterministic.)
Are you including the effective body count due to increased greenhouse gas emissions (for coal) and cancer incidence/habitat destruction (nuclear)? Not to mention the economic damage of the incredibly expensive reactors (nuclear) and pollution (coal), which can probably be abstracted into a body count as well due to poorer health and living conditions from pollution/wasted societal resources.
But no matter what you include for nuclear, you won't get the numbers very high.
> Not to mention the economic damage of the incredibly expensive reactors (nuclear)
It's not at all clear that nuclear is any more expensive than the alternatives if you accounts for the externalized costs of e.g. the huge bodycount from the alternatives.
You are assuming I am comparing nuclear to coal, or coal to nuclear...
You must be reading some pretty rosy estimates on nuclear energy compared to renewables if you think the costs make nuclear look good. And by costs I include dollars (the wastage of such having an impact on all our wellbeing as well by diverting from better solutions).
Actually, for anyone living in an actual city, bikes and cars are generally roughly equivalent in terms of trip time. For example, I have an 8km commute on the outskirts of Paris - it takes about 45mins, regardless of whether I run, ride a bike, take public transport, or drive a car. (Ok, to be more precise, in includi the time to change into sports gear for the bike / running. Without this the bike takes about 30mins. Running does actually take 45 mins run time.)
I think the biggest difference in mindsets between the US and Europe (other than the isolationism/socialism divide and religion) arises from their different scales.
Europe is far more densely populated. The cities are generally much closer to each other. There often isn't the equivalent of American "suburbs", instead there are more (and smaller) cities. Most people living in cities get around by walking or use the public transit.
Well, for what it's worth, I'm actually Australian, and our cities are very similar to those in the US. What I said holds as much for Perth or Sydney as it does for Paris and London. The key is that traffic congestion reduces average car speed to something roughly equivalent to what you do on a bike, ie 15-20km/hr...
This is off topic but I always find statements like the above rather bizarre. Why must humans insist on living in places where the environment is hostile to human life?
I guess its because I grew up in a place where heating is very rarely necessary, without cooling of any kind and have spent most of the last three years traveling around countries where you could theoretically walk around naked all year if you so desired but I increasingly find it bizarre how attached people are to living in locations that are ill-suited to humans.
Most of Eurasia is like that with several hundred million people living in regions with harsh winters.
Where would you re-settle four hundred million people?
Would they want to be unwelcome guests anywhere else?
As a species we lack fur, so we are really vulnerable to cold.
>Where would you re-settle four hundred million people?
No one is talking about resettling anyone. My question was just about why people individually choose to remain in places that feature temperatures well outside of the range compatible with our species. Others have covered it pretty well. Some combination of habituation, laziness and disliking hot summers basically.
People have been living in those cold climates long, LONG, before modern heating systems. More than "laziness and disliking hot summers" I would say that humans will settle wherever are resources that can support them, period.
An individual might move but that doesn't affect the topic we're talking about.
Also, moving is not easy: you have to learn new languages, acquire skills you did not have use for previously, and get a work permit.
(And for the hilarious part, we often see people from warm countries moving to more temperate ones because those are economically and politically better off)
> This is off topic but I always find statements like the above rather bizarre. Why must humans insist on living in places where the environment is hostile to human life?
Because by an unlucky twist of nature (physics and chemistry combined) the richest soils are found in temperate regions, so the lands that historically were capable of sustaining a high population density are in the colder regions, the ones where you need heating at least in winter.
Even now, with advances chemistry and fertilizers we'd not be able to sustain the worlds population if we all moved closer to the equator and gave up on regions that require heating at least in winter.
I grew up a bit farther than 45 degrees north of the Equator. I've been living in the tropics, about 22 degrees north, for 3 years now. I love my life here, but I still prefer the weather back home. You can always put on more clothes and/or walk more quickly, but you can't wear negative clothes.
Well, first of all just "moving" is a hassle. Then people, for whatever reason, tend to be attached to what they call "home." And third, probably, because we like it.
Does it matter why? Humans have been living in harsh environments since long before the beginning of written history, and I doubt it'll stop any time soon.
For the past few years, manned missions to the ISS take only 6 hours in ascent, all the rendez-vous maneuvering is being done in the duration of 4 orbits.
It used to take a few days, though. However, the crews take a pre-flight enema [0] and go through a diet to avoid having to go #2. There's a story that the Soyuz toilet has been used only once in ISS missions after a Cosmonaut had been eating prunes prior to departure back to earth [sorry, can't find a link].
So for orbital operations to/from the ISS, there's not much use for a space toilet. So little, that I wouldn't be surprised if there's no toilet at all and the fallback plan is to soil your pants, as crude as it sounds.
Apple hasn't had trouble selling 27"/30" Displays and iMacs before, if they can handle those, they can handle a HDTV display. An Apple TV Set just needs two things:
1. Input ZERO for Airplay. When you airplay a video from your phone/iPad, the TV turns on automatically and starts playing the video without you having to find the crappy TV and receiver remotes and switching to the right input.
2. The ability to upgrade easily by just plugging in a new $99 puck whenever you want to take advantage of a new service that requires more processing speed.
He was talking about driving the interface. The iPad has been designed from the ground up with capactive touch so that you can navigate an iPad with your fingers. Adding a pen digitiser changes nothing.
You clearly have never read the comic in question and have jumped on the band wagon. In no way was it a rape joke. Please show me how it was a joke about rape? I'm not a penny arcade fan but people who say that the original strip is a "rape joke" are the ones responsible for why the dickwolves saga will never be put behind us. You are perpetuating a myth that the original comic was a rape joke and in doing so are empowering rape culture.
Yes, I felt a bit ill during the first day but I have since got used to it. However, I think it's mainly because I've subconsciously learnt to not pay attention during the animations.
The market for fingerprint readers for smart phones was almost nothing. Just look at the motorola atrix. Now Apple has added a fingerprint scanner and integrated it purely to make it slightly easier to log into your phone, and the iPhone 5s has sold out.
If Apple added proper pen support with palm rejection software APIs to an iPad, you'll bet that people will still buy iPads. Mums will use pens to annotate their extension plans for their new house, maps to the park for child birthdays. Kids will use the pen to become better illustrators which will help them be better communicators later in life. Uni students will use pens to jot down notes quickly and draw math equations with ease.
The pen on a tablet is not a niche. The Surface Pro is a niche product.
I had the original Palm Vx. I would never use a stylus because it makes nothing easier, except drawing. The stylus is sort of a gimmick. If you need to get serious work done and you are serious enough to need a stylus, the iPhone and iPad are not for you. As Elton Brown would say 'there is no room in the kitchen for multitaskers.' They do a bad job at many things.
Touch unlock, however, is already in use by someone's grandpa... it's clean, it's easy. It's not multitasking. It's making the current norm safer and faster.
The palm vx, did not have a capacitive touch screen with an interface designed for touch. Adding pen support to the iPad does not affect the interface. I'm not sure how your comment is relevant to the conversation?
Exactly. Drawing includes illustration and annotation. Two things that make communicating faster and easier. As the old saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words.
>The market for fingerprint readers for smart phones was almost nothing. Just look at the motorola atrix. Now Apple has added a fingerprint scanner and integrated it purely to make it slightly easier to log into your phone, and the iPhone 5s has sold out.
The iPhone 5, 4s, 4 etc has sold out too, despite not having one. So I'm not sure it's the fingerprint scanner that's the differentiator here.
And the analogy is not apt for other reasons too. Apple didn't put a "fingerprint reader" because there was a market for it. They did it because it enables some things like easy mobile payments and better security.
Whereas with something like a wacom-like tablet capability, there IS a market, but it's tiny. And the technology doesn't offer much outside of that market (designers, painters and painting enthusiasts etc). There will be an improvement for handwritten notes and annotations, but that's not the major selling point of the iPad. If it was, Surface would have faired better too.
Still, they might add it at some point, if a dual-technology screen becomes cheaper and mature.
>The pen on a tablet is not a niche. The Surface Pro is a niche product.
> The iPhone 5, 4s, 4 etc has sold out too, despite not having one.
The iPhone 4 added a gyroscope, the 4s added a better microphones and associated audio chipset to improve speech recognition. The iPhone 5 added support for Airdrop. Following your logic then Apple really has no excuse not to add features like a digitiser because they will sell out anyway.
> They did it because it enables some things
Yes, and a pen digitiser and palm rejection enables reliable note taking, annotation and illustration.
> the technology doesn't offer much outside of that market (designers, painters and painting enthusiasts etc)
That's like saying that only journalists and novel writers need a keyboard, only photographers need a camera. The success of the iPad over traditional laptops has come from a natural way to interact with things directly like they do in real life. In real life people use pens everyday to jot things down.
> If it was, Surface would have faired better too.
What? The Surface does not have a pen. Only the Surface pro which is $400 more expensive than an iPad and doesn't run iOS.
Ideally, when you wake up in the morning, a great podcast app will open with an auto-generated playlist featuring your favourite podcasts that have new episodes released for that day, already downloaded and ready to go.
If you can't just press play on your podcast app and jump in your car or on your treadmill and have it play something you want to listen to without having to micro manage it beforehand, it's not a great podcast app.
I know of no podcast apps that can do this yet. So there is a lot of work to do in this field.
Tesla opened up their patents but I doubt current non-Tesla electric cars can actually be charged by them without over-heating.
I also doubt they will just let anyone use their superchargers because they are currently paying the power bill... but you'd have to be on the pay from some dubious source to turn this fact into anti-tesla spin.