Every so often, Slashdot comes up with these very witty, clever, and somewhat lengthy posts. Kudos to you - I never see stuff as good this on say Reddit.

Disagree, it's one of the funniest things I've read on Slashdot. The comment about WWJD leads up nicely to the stuff about energy sources and healthcare. It's summarizing, and then he goes into detail about why WWJD is the 'right' starting point.

Just a pity you posted anonymous. Can you reveal who you are?

Thrill: Fair enough, but there's always off-road or video games.

Safety: AI will only get better, and eventually beat even the most skilful drivers. It's inevitable.

Privacy: AI controlled cars may make it easier for outside control, but THAT'S what we should fight. We should never allow our freedom of AI controlled cars to be sacrificed because we're scared of big brother taking over. That in itself is a breach of freedom if we can't do what we want (have AI-controlled cars).

What you say seems to imply that the best design for a heatsink is a 3D fractal of some kind, where a big chunk of metal splits off into smaller chunks which themselves split off.

At first I thought you cared about the thrill of the experience being taken away. Then I thought you worried about the safety issues. And then finally, you seemed to care about the privacy issues.

mAh only tells half the story. You need the voltage in combination to determine the true energy capacity of the battery. Ideally we're looking at the 'watt-hour'. Only in a world where the voltage stays the same in all devices and conditions does it make sense to talk about amp hours as if that was the total energy.

I think the battery is more like $20k to 30k. I also think the battery will last a LOT longer than 5 years.

Here's a couple of ideas how long:
0.5% battery loss after >30K miles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

93% after 75K miles:
http://www.reddit.com/r/teslam...

I'd be happy going down to say 50% (assuming 200 mile range). I do around 10,000 miles each year, so doing the math, it'll take me over 500 years before I replace the battery. Okay, the sheer lifetime degrades the battery too, but I doubt it will kill it before say, 50 years.

An MOT is just something in the UK we need to have yearly so that a car is legal to drive on the road.

I hope you will now consider that batteries really have improved greatly, and can only better.

> nobody cares about mathematical efficiencies.

You're right there, but they will care about fuel cost - could be up to 5x cheaper to go with electricity for the same mileage.

> you know what people do care about? range and convenience time.

I agree. It's just as well then that Tesla's Model S can do 200-300 miles, and their cheaper $35,000 Model 3 (due out 2017) will do around 200 miles.

You want convenience? How about an MOT every 5 years instead of every year? EVs are incredibly simple, and have very few moving parts. They're as close to a solid state device as you're gonna get. Wouldn't surprise me to see the Teslas going for more than 50 years with very little servicing to speak of (apart from tyre changes, and window wipers).

Okay, fair enough.

But then going back to my original point, if it takes the same energy to accelerate... *in space* ...from 0 to 10mph as it does from 90 to 100mph, then aren't we creating more energy than we put into the system by crashing? What gives?

And how about Aero Glass? Do we get that back too?

I don't want spartan overly minimalist buttons, windows and dropdowns that hinder more than they help. I want delineated areas that indicate boundaries with beveled widgets that say "click me". I also don't want white-washed backgrounds that strain the eyes when I'm trying to work productively - I want various shades so I can see that the menu, taskbar or URL bar is not part of the main page.

Anti-aliasing is a hack that complicates things for a few reasons:

1: Anti-aliasing may look smoother but it also looks more blurred than non-antialiasing. That's why I based my test on no anti-aliasing.

2: If Apple isn't do it, then it must be at least somewhat inherently tricky to get right. And at the least it breeds bugs. Kludges usually breed bugs somewhere down the line as a rule of thumb.

3: Anti-aliasing complicates the OS (such as using Cleartype which has to be adjusted for every monitor it comes across etc.). Taking a screenshot and zooming in on the anti-aliased bits produces colour fringing.

4: Anti-aliasing complicates paint and word-processing software which has to take into account the techniques necessary for smooth line and curve drawing. Additionally, try filling in an area in paint software; anti-aliasing is not your friend.

5: Certain pictures with anti-aliasing use more colours, and eat up more memory as a result, especially when compressed in PNG format. A black and white picture uses 256 colours when it should use two. A colour picture..... well, the sky is the limit.

6: Scaling is much faster/simpler when you can do it the easy, and not to have worry about averaging neighbour pixels. Need I go on?

I think that's a very good point, and something I considered too. I'm not sure that would work for ever-increasing brightnesses though.

SO...... if you paint a white single-pixel width 15 degree line without any anti-aliasing onto a black background, what does the PPI need to be at so you don't notice any jaggies?

300? 600? 1200? 2400 or more?

Haha, that was probably a little unexpected for you. But I love the snappiness and cleanness of Haiku (just got to persuade them to implement a database/metadata filesystem now! :)