Would that be in the same way as a car's petrol gauge doesn't run out when it reads 'empty', and there's still a little in reserve ? And yet we don't say a petrol-fuelled car has a range of X(+Y) miles do we ? Why should that change for electric cars ?
At least you're posting under your own name in this thread. I can't quite believe how many anonymous cowards are writing long detailed argument posts. Seems very atypical of the site...
Simon.
In UK schools we teach this thing called "mathematics". We learn "algebra", and can form and solve simple equations before the minimum school-leaving age. It is therefore understood that everyone has the most basic grounding in mathematics that allows them to appreciate simple derivatives. Or even more simply...
charge at time (t=0) = X
charge at time (t=30 mins) = Y
charge at time (t=50 mins) = Z
plot the graph of charge vs time. It's a straight line. Read off the time value on the charge-axis intercept. That's how long it will last.
Simon. Sheesh.
You keep on harping on about the SCRIPTING IN ADVANCE part of filming a TV show, as if this is in any way not normal... I happen to have worked in the film industry. It's *completely* normal to have a script of what you're doing and when, as well as a rough outline of what you expect to happen. The producers wouldn't be doing their job if they *didn't* have such a script.
With that in mind, here's the show's producers comments on the scripting thing:
a) The truth is, Top Gear had already driven the car prior to filming, to enable us to form a view on it in advance
b) Our primary reasoning behind the verdict had nothing to do with how the Tesla performed; our conclusion was based mainly on the fact that it costs three times more than the petrol sports car upon which it’s based. It takes a long time to recharge, so you can’t use it as easily for the carefree motoring journeys that are a prerequisite of sports car driving. You can actually reach that conclusion without driving the car. As it happens, when it did come to the subjective area of how the car drove on the track, we were full of praise for its performance and handling.
c) Just so you understand there’s nothing devious going on, you need to know how this filming business works. When you film a car review, the reviewer is only the tip of the iceberg. Behind the lens is a film crew, and only a day’s worth of light to shoot the eight minute film. This means we have to prepare in advance a treatment – a rough draft of a script so that the director and film crew can get to work right away, knowing what shots they will need to capture. It will contain the facts about a car, and what we think of its looks and so on, but how well the car actually drives is added on the day. If we’ve driven it ahead of filming, as we do with most cars, we will also have an idea how it feels to drive. But, and this is crucial, as we uncover fresh information about a car whilst filming it, it is entirely normal for the treatment to be modified as the day unfolds. Jeremy is always tweaking the scripts to reflect what his driving experience has actually been on the day.
In terms of the what Clarkson actually said during the driving, he loved the car. It's the fundamental design faults that caused problems, and the fact that Tesla were marketing it as 'The Supercar. Redefined' led to TG testing it as a supercar (you know, on a racetrack). If you've seen any of their other supercar reviews, they're equally scathing about those cars deficiencies.
Tesla didn't get any worse or better treatment than any other manufacturer. They just went in there expecting to get a fawning love-fest type of review, perhaps they'd never actually watched the show...
Anyway, I'm out. I don't really care enough about this to argue it to completion.
So it was broken, then. Right. Gotcha.
If you're driving a car and it has power-assisted breaking you are naturally expecting the car to behave in a given way. If you get into a situation where the brakes do not react as strongly as you expect, that is potentially lethal - not just to you but to the poor pedestrian you didn't see.
No excuses. No "semantics" here. It was broken. End of.
What I'm reading from your post is that Top Gear identified a crucial weakness in the Tesla braking system, and Tesla has since fixed it. Good for Tesla, but to claim the original fault was specious is plain wrong.
- Here is a bottle of ethanol and here is an ethanol burner.
- Burn 1/50th of the contents of the bottle and notice that it takes 4 hours to burn through.
- Now you have two choices:
1) Burn the rest of the ethanol and sit there avidly timing it to see how long it takes
2) Multiply 50 x 4 => 200 in your head, taking less than a second, and go watch the game.
Top Gear chose option (2). You would appear to have chosen option (1). Personally I'm with TG on this one, I have better things to do with my time.
That's not too far off the mark, though, is it ?
Actually the last TGUK show I saw that had US cars in it gave them pretty good reviews. Standard TG procedure, they each chose a muscle-car and drove it across the country a bit. A few gimmicks along the way (police trap in the middle of nowhere, etc.) but IIRC they gave all the cars the thumbs-up at the end of the program.
No, he's right.
A "general purpose" tool is something that can be used for multiple purposes. There's no implication that the user has to be able to program it, let alone that the user should be able to program the machine using the machine itself. A single-purpose computer is something like the Bombe or the enigma machine. There are also analogue computers dedicated to specific tasks - it's the ability to *be* generally programmed that makes something general purpose, not the ability for the end-user to be able to program it; the distinction is small but significant.
My parents use a PC (it's a Mac, but hey) and all they ever use it for is email and the web. They could easily do that on a tablet as well. I'd humbly suggest there's a lot more people like my parents using "PC's" than there are people coding their own stuff on the very machine they bought. By sheer weight of numbers, the argument is carried in favour of the iPad (and other tablets) being PC's.
Our daughter signed up for Codeademy (http://codeademy.com/)to help her with a CS course she was taking at UBC. She's in Arts but needed a science and CS fit the bill. She found Codeademy very helpful. She got an A+ in the CS course.
Apple's position is somewhere between a rock and a hard place on this one. As stated by Tim Cook, their goal has become to produce a seismic shift in the way things work - since Apple is the poster-child for child-labour in Chinese sweatshops, they've decided to turn this around into an advantage (for the workers) rather than just let it be a whipping post for Apple when lazy editors need to fill some column inches.
They're making *all* the reports available, even when it reflects badly on Apple. Then they fix the bad bits. Lather, rinse, repeat. Their goal is to try and drag the industry kicking and screaming along with them; to have the questions become "why do *you* not provide this level of transparency?" to the Dells, the Samsungs, the (insert any techie brand you care to mention here)... In the short term, sure, there'll be families worse off because they need the kids income. In the medium-to-long term, by making this an open, public conversation, other suppliers will start to have to do these audits, and the working environment within China will benefit as a result.
No matter whereabouts on Apple's 'ooh shiny (smirk)' -> 'gotta have this' scale you happen to be, I think you have to support that as a laudable goal. I also think it has a good chance (possibly one of the very few) of working and thereby reducing the painful period when a country starts to apply minimum wages and look after its citizens better. I think that's a good thing too.
Simon
I'd love to see a source for that prediction.
As opposed to the entire populace of the USA which want to be gate-raped by the TSA, want to be locked up indefinitely without trial in Gitmo, and consider it the lesser evil that innocent children should die rather than american men with small penises give up their gun-toys.
Or perhaps there's a *populace* that is outraged by all these things, but a *government* that implements them. On both sides of the pond.
Simon.
I'd have thought that was clear from the last paragraph. I'm from the UK. I've lived here for almost a decade now, long enough to gain an informed view, I think.
Simon.
Let me be clear here. I'm very much against guns being as prolific as they are. The bullshit defeatist "if guns are illegal, only criminals will have them" argument is so abundantly wrong-headed it defies belief, IMHO. Just look at the gun statistics in England compared to the the US and you have a compelling argument.
However.
When you're looking for reasons why one society in particular has a record of atrocities like this, the first place to look is what makes that society unique. The famous NRA quote "It's not guns that kill people, people kill people" was an attempt to deflect criticism of the penis-extensions^W^W guns generally available (to which my and Eddie's retort is "sure, but the gun helps!"), but like all good propaganda it contains a kernel of truth. The real question then is "why are these people killing each other ?"
The real reason people are using guns to kill themselves and others is the society that they live in. The cold hard truth is that guns are available worldwide, and yet it's a peculiarly American thing (with some outliers) to go crazy and kill a bunch of children/people using your personal arsenal. What's wrong is deeper, I believe.
IMHO American society is in a slow but inevitable death spiral...
It's hard to reconcile that Americans give generously to charities with the first two points above, unless it's just Democrats doing the giving; which is unlikely
Religion also plays its part. The society is highly religious, relative to the developed world but religion here in the US is a business like any other. The prime goal is not to try and guide society in the right direction, it's to funnel cash to the higher-ups in the religious power structure. People are told they're doing the right thing as long as the cash is flowing upwards,and the "church"'s goal is simply to continue to make sure that is the case. Upon examination, it's a good metaphor for what's wrong in the more-general society.
It adds up to an uncaring society, and I can see how anyone stuck on the lower rungs with seemingly no prospect of getting higher up could reject it, and similarly reject the rest of the social rules we all expect to be obeyed. There's no golden solution here, no panacea, you're not guaranteed anything will ever be perfect, but if the society had more general welfare built in, it's my personal belief there'd be less atrocities.
A society is by definition a group of people collectively living by a set of rules. Ask any evolutionary theorist what's important, and (s)he'll tell you it's the rules of the game and the boundary conditions imposed by the environment. The environment in the USA needs a lot of attention IMHO. It's forcing the society down some unwholesomely bad paths.
Just IMHO, as an outsider looking in. Unlike most, I'm not stuck here. I've made no secret of the fact that I doubt I'll be staying here much longer. The above is why.
Simon.
Tasers kill in very rare cases.
Not so rare. So far it seems we're up to 758 or more.
If the officers had tried to man-handle this lady, that could also result in death. Just as unlikely.
Nowhere near. Find me a statistic that says police officers have killed 750+ people by picking them up and force-walking them to the squad car. This is a quote that's often bandied around, but it has no substance - weasel words like "could" creep in so that the intent of the phrase is actually to mislead rather than communicate.
But man-handling could very likely cause non-lethal injury to both her and the officers. That's why I said that the officers were in a no-win situation. The blame here, from what is known, should be solely on the suspect. She refused to leave. She wrestled with the officers as they attempted to handcuff her. Once she was finally in custody, she was bailed out and sent home. It was her choice to refuse to leave. It was her choice to resist arrest. I saw news footage of her at home that very night, she's fine. Of course she's playing it up as best she can, I'm sure she'll be filing law suits any day now.
As she should. There should never be a need for two heavily armed and well-trained men to electrocute one small woman in order to get her second arm into handcuffs.
"You are *not* supposed to use them like glorified cattle prods[.]"
There's nothing to indicate the police used the taser for such a reason. They used it to subdue a subject that was physically resisting arrest. That's what they're for.
No. It's not. These weapons are replacements for when an officer would otherwise shoot the suspect, they are still lethal weapons, they just don't kill as often as bullets do. That was their stated benefit. The slippery slope was too much, and now they're used *exactly* as I described - as cattle prods to subdue anyone making the police officers job anything but simple.
It doesn't appear that she was harmed, otherwise the footage that night would have been from a hospital bed.
Which is irrelevant. It is the principle that is outrageous here, not the specific case.
The officers don't appear to have been harmed either. The device worked.
Your anecdote adds little. We don't know precisely what led to the take-down. The video that circulated conveniently left that part out. For all we know, the officers did attempt to take control the same way you describe. That approach isn't always going to work, especially if she intended to cause trouble. The taser was the officer's truncheon. I'd argue it's less violent, there's no impact.
You're missing my point completely. The UK police *carry* truncheons as a part of the symbol of their authority. They very rarely get *used*. The US police appear to electrocute people who they really have no reason to. There is a massive difference there.
As for violence, the violence of the act has nothing to do with the impact potential, it has to do with the potential for damage. Strangling someone is seen as worse than breaking their leg. Being electrocuted is worse than getting a bruised arm (bones are significantly harder to break than you seem to think) because of the much greater possibility of killing the suspect.
Electric shock isn't fun, but any effects dissipate rapidly.
Sure. If it doesn't kill you.
As for firearms, that was not an element of the story, so why even bring it up? Makes me think you might be participating in this discussion mostly because you don't agree with the way our society functions. You should understand that to many of us, your officers running around without firearms is probably as appalling as you view our own. I have no issue with a well-armed citizenry. I fear a government that forbids it.
The firearms was relevant in the context of the other site, but be that as it may, I fail to see how an unarmed policeman who can't (and won't) electrocute you is appalling compared to an armed policeman who can and does.
You're correct, by the way. I used to be far more pro- the USA than I am having lived here for almost a decade. At the moment, I'm not really sure your society does function. It gets by, and from my perspective it seems to be eating itself to do so. I'm presumably someone the US wants very much to stay here - I pay a lot of taxes for example, but I'm seriously starting to think about the exit strategy. Maybe the year coming, maybe the year after, but I'm not long for this place.
Policeman 1 grabs the left arm while policeman 2 grabs the right arm. How exactly does she "whip out a knife" with both arms held ?
On the eighth day, God created FORTRAN.
