Comment Re:Service with a Smile (Score 0) 526
At least the car was upbeat and friendly about its impending doom!
If I was in charge the car would scream in pain.
"It burns! It burns! What have you done to me??? Oh the pain!"
At least the car was upbeat and friendly about its impending doom!
If I was in charge the car would scream in pain.
"It burns! It burns! What have you done to me??? Oh the pain!"
Electric motors are efficient as far as speed, but IMHO the Achilles's heel of electric cars is the range on a charge along with the ease and speed of charging the vehicle. I'd hate to be motoring down the Autobahn at 130-140 mph and run out of battery. A gasoline or diesel powered car has a range of 300-500 miles (depending on speed, engine efficiency, and size of tank), so assuming a 1/2 full or better tank, running out of fuel after 80-100 miles is not an issue. Even if the tank is low, it is easy to find a station and fill up in a few minutes, then get back on the road.
I assumed that the "at least" comment in the headline meant "we got to 132MPH and could have gone faster but ran out of battery"
btw, a modern turbo diesel engine in a small/medium car should be able to do 1000km (~600miles) on a 50L tank easily. I could get 1200km (~730miles) in my car at highway speeds on a good day
Isn't this what we have math for?
Most people don't understand math and think you are just trying to baffle them with bullshit. If you do an experiment though, which most people also don't understand, they'll think you're dazzling them with brilliance. There are some stupid "experiments" on youtube about the GFC involving balloons and weights and strings that operate on this principle.
Seriously? Why is everybody getting worked up over this?
I can't speak for anyone else but i'm just mostly trolling for mod points. Slashdotters can't mod up a "big brother is coming to get you" post fast enough.
Then when they detect cocaine, you'll get a ticket in the mail.
The mail? They are already in your sewers, they can simply deliver the ticket that way, and maybe probe you when you are on the can just for good measure. "Please remain still, citizen. You may feel a small amount of discomfort, but struggling will just make it worse. If you haven't done anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about".
Is it really that hard to imagine there exists some middle ground?
Of course there is a middle ground. You decide how much of your freedom you are willing to give up to secure some temporary safety and then vote accordingly.
Bomb attacks are so rare, wouldnâ(TM)t it be cheaper to compensate bomb victims after the fact than include expensive bomb-sniffing equipment in infrastructure upgrades up and down the land?
This, but not for reasons of financial cost. The price of living in a free society is that occasionally someone is going to get pissed off at the world and blow up spectators at a marathon or take a gun to a classroom of kiddies. It would be great if we could stop this, but if the only way of stopping it is to take away your freedom and allow the government to spy on its people then maybe the price is too high. And from a financial point of view, maybe the money would be better spent on education and help for people who need it.
That said, this sounds like a cool idea from a technical point of view. I'm conflicted.
Dear Sir, We were monitoring the sewer and it seems your daughter is pregnant. We checked the DNA and it is that kid you don't like. We only know you don't like him because the NSA shares information with us. On the side are ads for abortion clinics, diaper services, gun shops, and obstetricians provided by WalMart. BTW you need to check your cholesterol.
That might be a bit of a stretch, but OTOH detecting traces of THC or other drugs like that might not be outside the scope of this sort of project, and may not correlate with the average persons idea of a free society.
There's no relationship to how fast you go vs. safety. The Germans prove it every day.
As a comparison from the link above, for 2010 we averaged 6.87 fatalities for all roads per billion km (Bkm) of travel in the US, Germany 5.18.
There is a very well established relationship between speed and safety.
If you are doing 30mph down a suburban street and something jumps out in front of you, or some moron brakes for no apparent reason, you have way more time to react than if you are doing 100mph. At 30mph someone might get hurt. At 100mph someone is going to die.
I think we'd both agree that doing 100mph down a suburban street is just me playing reductio ad absurdum, but it's easy to prove that the slower everyone goes the safer we all are. We just have to find a point between "everyone does 5mph and nobody dies, won't somebody _PLEASE_ think of the children!" and "everyone does 200MPH, i'm in a hurry dammit!" that balances safety and reasonable travel times
And I think we'd both agree that averaging 98MPH from coast to coast is too fast. Your German autobahn's are designed for those sort of speeds, and that's great, but i bet the roads this guy was travelling on aren't nearly that safe, especially if the other traffic is going 30-60MPH.
Look, we all know everyone speeds. 5-10 MPH over the speed limit is socially acceptable and tacitly condoned (it's rare to get pulled over by the cops for that, unless they want to bust you for some unrelated reason). But this is entirely different – it seems to be a clear case of reckless driving. On most interstates, you can do 75 MPH no problem, and on the better ones, 85 MPH is reasonable during the daytime if there is no inclement weather. There are a few interstates where you can safely do 90-100 MPH, but these are not all that common, and even then, extreme caution is required. I don't see any possible way that someone could safely average nearly 100 MPH on a cross-country road trip. Safety comes by going with the flow of traffic, and this driver must have been blowing past the majority of other cars during most of his trip. It's amazing that he made it there in one piece.
I'm somewhat conflicted about this.
There was nothing safe about it. He might be the best driver in the world, but no amount of being the best drive in the world can save you from the other idiots on the road, especially when you are doing an _average_ speed of 98MPH. This was reckless and put others at risk and if they catch him he probably shouldn't be allowed to drive again for a long time.
That said, I'm more than a little bit in awe of the fact that he pulled this off. That part of the equation is kind of awesome. The police had 28 hours to figure out that there was someone speeding across the country and bring out the helicopters etc and catch him, but he made it. In fact it all seems so unlikely in a country like the US that i'm almost a little dubious that it happened at all.
Ceiling fans count as cooling..
I pondered that as I was posting. I was going to add a footnote about the difference between a ceiling fan that just moves air around to enhance your body's natural cooling but doesn't actually cool the air vs a device that actually cools down the air before delivering it to you, but I figured most people would know what I meant... but maybe not.
Kinda reminds me of drinking brandy to feel warmer.
Or maybe it's like eating spicy food to keep cooler?
Whatever could go wrong with that?
I wondered about that. Is your level of thermal comfort directly related to the difference between your body temp and your desired body temp. If you are sweating to keep cool and feeling hot and yuck, will making you feel nice by cooling your wrist turn down/off your sweating, resulting in dangerous overheating, or will it just make you feel better but keep the sweat pouring out? I'm sure TFA has the details but I didn't read it when it originally appeared on slashdot so i'm sure not reading the dupe.
Another way to cool off in hot weather is to wet your arms down with cold water but not dry them off. The water will evaporate, drawing heat out of your arms in some natural air conditioning.
At night before we had any form of cooling i'd put our top sheet in the washing machine on rinse and then spin it enough so it wouldn't drip. With the ceiling fan on fairly low it generated enough evaporative cooling that we could get a good nights sleep. Of course if it was hot and humid we just ended up feeling yuck, but most of the heat here is fairly dry.
If you think the system is working, ask someone who's waiting for a prompt.
