The hard part probably is to identify said solid objects. You want the car to stop or avoid bicycles or other objects, but you probably also do not want the car to randomly hit the brakes because it mistook a shadow for a bicycle.

Yeah, everybody forgets that the early days of the motor car were wild and that it was not obvious at the time that the car is better than a horse.

AFAIK when the Ford Model T came out, it was the first car to be affordable and good enough (especially when they added an electric starter), then the car took over.

As for the hybrid, apparently they are making similar hybrids again - someone I know owns a Nissan X-Trail which apparently works like that, but it has a small battery for regenerative braking and such.

Yes. While it is completely obvious to us now, the first gas cars sucked. They were expensive, you were in danger of breaking your wrist every time you wanted to start the engine.
That's why for a short time they also made cars with steam engines (using gasoline as fuel) for people with lots of money and others just stuck with their horses. After a while, once the gas cars improved and became cheaper, more people bought them.

Same with EVs - some people are early adopters - they want new technology, they were the first ones to buy EVs. Some people drive a lot and like that EVs are cheaper to operate, so when they were looking for a new car, they bought an EV. Others buy used cars that are cheap or buy a new car and use it for 15 years. Those two groups won't be running to buy EVs.

I do not live in California, but I plan on using my horse (that is, an old gas powered car with no computers) as long as possible. I do not like modern cars, whatever their power source is and if forced, I'd probably convert my car to an EV rather than buy an EV that needs apps,internet connection and updates to function.

From my experience v7 works fine and even supports OpenVPN using UDP.
However, there are a few things - one being the PIM (multicast) problem. It works good on v6 and is broken on v7. Another is if you try to upgrade from an older v6 version straight to v7 (by drag-dropping the file), the router may fail to boot. You need to have a fairly recent v6 (it does not have to be the latest, but pretty recent) to be able to upgrade to v7

Then again, I have not done anything really complicated with MT routers - basic router, OpenVPN, IPSec that's mostly it.

RouterOS 7 works OK, as long as you do not need multicast routing (PIM-SM), v6 works great for that, but they managed to completely break it on v7.As far as I know, everything is better on v7, except that.

I have been using Debian and iptables as my home router and as office routers for some companies (and as core router of some ISPs). No Web UI, but I don't need it and I can run other stuff on it if I want to. Mikrotik's version of tcpdump is less convenient than the real one for example.

Seconded for the Mikrotik recomendation, though I prefer Ubiquiti APs and MT switches (just stay away from SwOS). OTOH, Mikrotik routers work great too. Not as flexible as Linux used as a router, but pretty good.

Or, Debian (or whatever your favorite distro is) and iptables. Works just fine and I can run other stuff on it if I want to.

The only thing I noticed was that the File Manager showed file dates wrong, so whatever. Norton Commander shows the date correctly. Maybe I should find and install the patch.

A lot of the time it would be this problem. Bill wrote the original software, it needs an update and Jeff looks like the guy to do it - he somewhat understands how the old software works (and he can ask Bill for stuff he doesn't know) and knows some "current" programming language/system. Whatever documentation/comments he writes nobody will check because Jeff is the only one making changes anyway, there's nobody else.

While a large organization like the German Railways probably should have more people on that, I have seen small companies only have one programmer and that's it. There's not enough work to hire a second programmer, so the one guy does whatever he wants.

If the software worked for 10 years with no problems, I think I'd take that as good enough and that it will most likely work for 10 more years.

And when you rewrite the software (assuming someone is willing to pay for it), you replace Bill with Jeff, but everything else stays pretty much the same Hopefully the new version works as well as the old version, but if something bad happens and Jeff is not available, you probably have more problems than with the old version without Bill, because at least the old version was "tested" for 30 years and hopefully most bugs fixed.

Why doesn't it work? Windows 3.11 works in 2024, I tried it yesterday. It can even connect to a samba server in Debian 10, though if files have long names, those names get messed up worse than what Windows 98 used to do.

In Lithuania, when you first get your license, you are limited to 70km/h (90km/h on a highway) for 2 years. You can drive a sports car i you want, but you cannot go over that personal limit. It is not really enforced though, since, while you have to have a sticker on your car that says you are a beginner (a green maple leaf), it's on the back of the car so its not like the speed camera can see it. Of course, if you get caught speeding, you'll pay a higher fine.

There were talks about limiting the performance of the car (engine power to car weight ratio), but it did not go anywhere. IMO it's not needed and would only make people's lives worse. Usually, when an 18 year old gets his license, he does not go and immediately buy a car (unless he has the money, is a car enthusiast etc), instead his parents let him drive their cars and maybe will even give one of their old cars while buying a newer one for themselves. Not being able to drive your parents car would be a problem.

Your proposal would be even worse. What car cannot go over 50mph/80km/h? Even a Trabant could reach about 100km/h top speed (it took a while though).

There is no real vehicle tax in my country (at least for regular cars), so yeah, they use the fuel tax for roads (and to line the pockets of the members of the government). About half of fuel price is tax - VAT and then the excise tax.
They'll figure out how to get the same amount of money from EV drivers once a lot of people drive EVs.

I honestly do not see the government going "oh, you have your own solar panels and you charge your EV from the surplus electricity they produce? It's great, you don't need to pay us anything, the VAT you paid on the solar panels 10 years ago is still good enough".

So, it will either be a vehicle tax (which would annoy the people who do not rive a lot), some kind of distance-traveled tax (which would annoy the people who drive a lot and bought EVs because they are cheaper to operate) or they'll invent something else, like heavily taxing the electricity at public charging stations.

Just like if everyone stopped smoking tomorrow, the government would figure out how to get the money from somewhere else.

Yeah, design seems OK, but manufacture quality and quality check is not. This could actually be worse than a design defect. If something turns out to be a design defect, the part can be replaced with one that is better designed. But here, well, if they forgot to bolt in the door plugs on this airplane, what else did they forget to do? Maybe another airplane has half the bolts that hold the wings missing. I doubt the airlines can check everything without completely disassembling the airplane.

Well, just because two devices have batteries does not mean you can charge one from the other. You can jump start a gas-powered car by connecting the two batteries in parallel, but an EV may not have such connection points easily accessible and different models could use different voltages etc.
So, an EV would need additional electronics to be able to charge another EV.

It's like connecting two laptops together and charging one from the other. Maye with some models it would work, but with others it would not.

However, someone else answered that most EVs have inverters and you can charge one from the other.