... how on earth do they think they will not eventually get caught?

I realize that they dare not explicitly say that is what they are going to do, but once they are caught doing it, it will amount to exactly the same consequence as if they had.

Tire noise is not nearly as loud as you think it is

Outside of first gear on an ICE, the noise of tires on the road will dominate the noise that any properly functioning modern vehicle is making. The tire noise is still very plainly audible on a car that is simply coasting with no engine running at all (which could be argued to be comparable to the noise level of a pure electric vehicle) at even surprisingly slow speeds... basically anything over about 15km/h or so.

That said, tire noise rises logarithmically with speed, and at slow enough speeds, it can admittedly be difficult to hear. However, as the speed of the vehicle is reduced, the driver also gains much more time to react to anything that might be unexpected, and at speeds where the tire-on-road noise is genuinely not easily perceptible, the stopping distance can be well less than 10 feet (virtually zero in many cases) unless the road is icy (which incidentally tends to be noisier on tires than asphalt at a given speed anyways, and so is more likely to be heard anyways).

Is the bell required, by law, to be constantly ringing while the bicycle is in motion? No? Then my point stands... the bicycle is, on its own, relatively silent, and just as capable of inflicting injury that can be just as serious as that caused by an automobile that is moving in silence (because at anything over a few mph, the vehicle tires on the road will be be plainly audible anyways).

If the closing speed is that fast, you are going to hear the sound of the vehicle's tires on the road before you hear the vehicle's engine, unless the vehicle's engine is faulty, or there is something wrong with its muffler.

If a vehicle is approaching at anything over about 20mph, the noise of the tires on the road will generall be louder than the engine, unless the engine is faulty, or the vehicle has a bad muffler. And in practice, you can hear the sound of tires on the road of any approaching vehicle when it is going any faster than just rolling at speeds one could keep pace with on foot. I remember from when I first learning to drive, drivers are supposed to have an obligation to be aware of and respect pedestrians that may not know the vehicle is there, such as blind people anyways.

Bicycles don't make much noise either... neither do electric wheelchairs or other sidewalk-based vehicles. They are all just as capable of running down somebody who cannot see them as a car would be, and although the likelihood of a fatality is somewhat lower, primarily owing to the lower mass of such items, and in turn the total momentum involved in any collision with them, the injuries from such a colision can still be very severe, and can even require hospitalization.

If it is presenting different images to each eye to create the illusion of depth, then it is definitely *NOT* holography.... holography uses just a single image that, all by itself, will appear different from different angles because it is a 3d optical representation of whatever the hologram is an image of.

Where did you read what technique it is using for imaging?

I'm not saying that things that can sometimes be described as being worse than death aren't really all that bad, but I *am* saying that anything where you are still alive, regardless of how you end up or how rotten your position, is better than not coming alive out of it at all, without somehow quantifying the value of a human life.

Last time I checked, there wasn't any coming back from death. A fascist dictatorship, however, can at least be eventually overthrown.

Of course, overthrowing said regime requires that you actually be alive.

The obvious extrapolation to the machines doing everything is no need for money

Except for the fact that people are greedy and are always wanting more.... any proposed no-money model usually fails to account for a disturbingly large percentage of people who will *ALWAYS* try to exploit those with less power.

.... is that it will no longer make sense to pay people to do work when you can get machines to do the same job for free. With *FAR* more people than jobs available, we'd be looking at record numbers of people who are unemployable who have skills that even today, it's almost impossible to imagine someday being replaced by a machine. Without jobs, many people will have to either resort to crime, or starve, because it is unlikely that a social infrastsructure can exist to support them (it can't even support the number of unemployed and homeless that exist today, how does anyone think that it would be better in a future with prevalent AI, with fewer people actually working and therefore paying taxes, and so less money available overall to even implement such programs?)

And as AI gets sufficiently advanced, I expect that there will eventually be virtually no thought process that humans are capable of which cannot be performed equally or better by an artificial intelligence, and I expect that the number of jobs available a century from now that are practical for human employment will be less than a fifth of what we have today.

Of course, automation has happened plenty of times before and it's always brought about new career opportunities in the past, but we've never automated the process of creative and independent thought before, and automation has never been historically possible on scales that practical AI could really accomplish, so I'm not entirely sure that past experience would apply to AI's.

FTS:

Last year, Tesla delivered about 33,000 Model S sedans and said the current wait for delivery is one to four months. Tesla has already presold every Model S that it plans to build in 2015. "If you ordered a car today, you wouldn't get it until 2016."

There's no contradiction at all... last year, they said that the wait was one to four months. At the time that they said this, that is actually what it was at the time, hence their use of the word "currently". Now the waitlist is more like a year.

I don't think a dealership actually have any cars to function.

You're wrong, at least in terms of selling new cars at retail. I think dealerships without car lots can exist if they are a wholesaler, but it's my understanding that if they are selling new cars to the general public, they need to maintain a stock of vehicles that they can actually sell. I'm not saying they need to stock every car that they sell, but they still have to have at least some stock of unsold cars. As every Tesla that is currently made is already sold before it even gets out of the factory, there are zero unsold Telsas to put in car lot. Tesla showrooms exist, but the car they have on display is privately owned, and you can only test drive it by appointment, or on scheduled days when the vehicle owner will be there and they can let a bunch of people test drive it. the Tesla showroom near my place has only had a couple such days in all of 2014. I've met the owner of the vehicle, and he doesn't even work for Tesla. I imagine he is compensated by Tesla for showing his vehicle, although I don't know how much.