Yes.

The energy costs are probably almost non-existent compared to the installation costs for the superchargers (IIRC, many or all of them need dedicated substations), Tesla has a lot of room to play with because of how expensive their cars are, and it's a nice sales draw to say "hey you don't even have to worry about the hassle of paying."

There are Tesla superchargers frequent enough along all of I-80. You're still going to make mediocre time, but it is doable without spending weeks.

It's possible to have charging stops that are barely more inconvenient than fill ups.

"Much less than hours" is still a long way from "barely more inconvenient than fill ups." Even with superchargers, you're looking at multiple stops during a day's drive that are longer than any stop I make when on a road trip. Under harsh but realistic conditions, you could be looking at a 40-minute supercharge every 2 to 2 1/2 hours; that's downright bad.

To get to "barely more inconvenient than fill ups" I think that you either need battery swaps or you need charges that are (1) almost twice as fast as a supercharger, (2) placed better in certain cases*, (3) need to have a guaranteed low or no wait, and (4) need better coverage**.

* In particular, on toll roads they "need "to be accessible without exiting, which they are not, at least looking at my usual trip from WI to PA/NY.

** Even on Tesla's "end of 2015" planned locations on their website, there is no charging station along I-86 in southern NY. Stations in the plains states are widely-spaced. There's essentially no coverage away from interstates.

Insurance companies will protect us (selfishly) frmo this being taken too far.

Or they'll just raise rates by $100/6mth and what are you going to do... not have a car?

Though actually, if hypothetically CF is able to dissipate energy in a useful way better than crumpling metal, it could hypothetically reduce injuries enough that the total cost of accidents decrease even if lots of CF needs to be replaced. I'm a bit skeptical of that, but it's certainly true that it's not hard to rack up enough medical bills to make even a brand-new car look cheap...

One thing I'd be curious/worried about is cracking CF vs denting aluminum. In other words, suppose something happens that will cause some cosmetic dents in aluminum skin -- say dimples from hail. (This happened my car.) With an aluminum skin, I don't even need to get it repaired. I'll look silly, but as long as the car is mine that's the only ill effect I'll suffer.

But how much more would it take before that dent became a crack that would need to be repaired because otherwise it would let in rain, or perhaps even compromise the safety of the car in some way? And could it even be repaired as opposed to replacing the whole panel, as you mention?

The damages paid in the settlement are 1/30 as large as they should be

Well, as large as they hypothetically could(?) be if it went to trial and the plaintiffs won and the judge decided to stick it to the defendants. Not every trial does or should result in the maximum verdict.

The amount of money the companies have simply indicates that they would be able to pay the full amount, and that it doesn't make sense to settle for less

It also makes sense to settle as a risk management strategy. Defendants settle to avoid the risk of a guilty verdict* that will cost more, and plaintiffs settle to avoid the risk of a not guilty verdict that will at best get them nothing and at worst sic them with legal bills.

* I don't know if civil trials technically use the "guilty"/"not guilty" terms; probably they do not.

That's where I have been having personal issues lately - all engineering jobs are for creating worthless consumer crap; like the Segway.

Keep in mind that the technology behind the Segway wasn't invented for the Segway; it was invented for this wheelchair.

The Segway got the attention because it's something that had the potential to have a much broader market, considering that the population that can't walk is pretty small.

In addition to what the other reply said: chicken and egg.

Professors on tenure track want publications in highly-rated conferences and journals. Professors who have tenure want their students to get publications in highly-rated conferences and journals. So when they have a good paper, they want to submit to them.

The prof or grad student isn't directly paying the costs of closed journals, so why would they take the risk of submitting their best work to a journal that at best is untested when they think they can get it into one that is highly-respected?

For people to submit good papers to it, the open-access journal needs to be well-respected; to be well-respected it needs to publish good, impactful papers; to publish good, impactful papers people need to submit said papers to it.

Probably we'll get there one day as the quality of papers submitted to open-access journals gradually increase (because while there is little incentive to submit to them, many people will consider little to not be zero), but it'll take time.

However, unlike preventing flying-mammal-caused motorcycle deaths for a couple of years, preventing all polio deaths for a couple of years means we may never have to worry about it ever again.

Attempting to use the handbrake (parking brake, etc. etc.) to stop from speed will almost certainly make your situation a lot worse.

Yeah, it'll make the car smell funny as you're crashing. :-)

I've done some very light investigation of cars recently (mine blew its timing belt with an interference engine and I was trying to determine if it was worth repairing), and from what I can tell, that's still true.

For example, from cars.com, selecting an automatic transmission Civic or Accord adds $741-800. An automatic transmission Jetta TDI adds $1,100. An automatic transmission Miata adds $2,200. An automatic transmission Focus adds $1,095.

Now, those are the prices if you order a custom car, not necessarily what you could get from your dealer. But still, at least coming out of the factory, stick shifts are still cheaper.

We lost "control" decades ago with the advent of vacuum/RPM spark advance, it's been down hill from there. ... If they had just a little bit of an idea about how cars worked, they'd be a whole lot safer...

Actual evidence disagrees with you. Those things that have made it possible to not know as much about what your car is doing, which you say have contributed to a lack of safety, have been a contributor to an impressive decline in automotive deaths and injuries.

That's not to say that things couldn't be better than they are... but you're full of it if you think the situation was better when cars were less complicated.

I stopped reading after the first two paragraphs.

...then you missed the entire point of his post.

Nah, everyone who believes in homeopathy knew the truth right away: you just have to wait a while for the plane to diffuse around, and then even a teaspoon of ocean water will contain enough black box information to solve the mystery. That the "disappearance" hasn't been solved yet is just continuing evidence of the establishment's biases against reality.

Lots of mine (actually, almost all) had assigned paper readings, but now that you can get almost any CS paper you want free on the web collecting said papers into something that your students pick up explicitly is a lot less important than it was 20 years ago. I wouldn't count that anyway -- by "textbook" I really mean, well, a textbook. An attempt to write up of lots of existing, widely-accepted knowledge into a coherent presentation aimed at a "broad" audience. (Broad here is relative of course; I just mean not "here's what we put together for CS #### at Awesome State University.")