So yeah, here's part of the issue. Car shredders. Crushed cars don't just get dumped into big pits of molten steel, crushed cars get shredded with large high speed hammermills and the component materials - iron/steel, aluminum - get separated out by magnetic and eddy current separators. The rest is called Auto Shredder Residue and ends up landfilled. It's all the copper and the materials that used to be glass and plastic dashboards and o-rings in Macpherson struts and stuff like that.

If you haven't seen ASR, it's a relatively fine grain, probably mostly under 0.5", and with modern cars, it's mostly plastic.

If you drop a Tesla into a car shredder (the eventual fate of most cars), I think the batteries will end up as ASR. And then you're trying to separate cobalt battery components from the old stuffed toys left in the back seat.

How do we shred this better, and why are we not already doing this with municipal waste? Hammermills have windage losses and crazy internal wear. Low veolcity high torque machines need even worse maintenance. Robots to disassemble cars seems like a good idea, until you've actually worked in an automotive wrecking yard and seen that cars often no longer look like cars....

There we go. Heavy water, the ultimate in pricey bottled water.

Move over, Perrier. This one's got kick!

It's neat that we can taste the difference, and if bottled water suppliers can mass produce it as a beverage it will surely reduce the operating costs of some types of nuclear reactors.

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company.

Our toilets are much the same here in Canada - residential use toilets are gravity-fed with typically 6L per flush from a "close-coupled" tank which is mounted directly on top of the bowl. The tank is filled from municipal or well supply, which is typically at 50PSI or so, but the fill valve is the only part of the system under pressure.

They operate by momentum, not by pressure. m1*v1 = m2*v2. The pressure would be limited by the head, which is typically only 2 feet or so. The secret to their effectiveness is allowing 6 kilograms of water to accelerate as quickly as possible in the height allowed by the design and have it collide with the ...dark matter... to drive it away.

Most residential plumbing systems use 1/2" ID supply pipe which would simply not allow a pressurized flush like a commercial toilet to be effective. There are exceptions which use bladder systems to attempt to leverage the standing water pressure of the municipal water supply to drive the flush water down to the bowl as quickly as possible. These systems tend to be expensive, unreliable, and loud, although one day these issues may be resolved.

Improvements to the existing system will require very carefully designed bowls and trapways and exceptionally well-installed plumbing with regard to soil pipe slope and venting. My own home is outfitted with 3L per flush toilets which do an admirable job - I have yet to clog them, even after a visit to a buffet restaurant - despite being purely momentum-based close-coupled toilets without the additional complexity and failure-prone seals in dual-flush mechanisms.

Adding technology is not the answer to this problem. Keeping it as simple as possible but doing the basics really well is key.

ALL tape formats, whether open-reel or inside a cassette or cartridge, are vulnerable to this form of failure. So your dad's 8-tracks and cassettes are hardly immune. In fact, 8-tracks, even when they're not left in the sun on car dashboards, die because they're an endless loop and the glue that holds the metal foil splice that signals the track change has a tendency to fail... and the lubricant on the tape might even exacerbate the failure of the binding. 8-tracks were marginal at best when they were new; most machines of the day basically knocked their heads out of alignment four times with each album. But they were designed for car audio at a time when a good car sound system was a 5x7" speaker in the dashboard and road noise drowned out the tape hiss.

The Philips Compact Cassette (a cassette, to most people) was designed for dictation machines where sound quality was not a design criteria. It's a miracle of our technology that they ever sounded good enough for things like the Sony Walkman to happen.

The machines were, and still are, beautiful. Good ones were usually pretty expensive and represented the state of the art in their day, like a flagship smartphone or laptop computer now. Even obsolete, you can see the quality and the beauty.

But the real problem is the recordings. It's not just stuff like home recordings off the radio, it's original masters of albums. The Beatles early BBC stuff was recorded on Ferrograph machines (I love that name, think about what it means). God only knows what the tape formulation was; iron oxide, for sure, but what were the binders?

Most Slashdotters will be familiar with cassettes moving the tape at 1-7/8 inches per second. 7-1/2 inches per second was common in home audio. 15 inches per second in professional/studio audio use was fairly slow! At those speeds, as the tape plays, the oxide breaks free from the binder and blocks the head gap pretty quickly. Slowing down the tape and digitally replaying it faster might help, but it doesn't change the fact that A Day In The Life is a lot of tape at 15IPS - and a it's distance, not speed, that really clogs the head gaps. 5 minutes and 35 seconds is 418 feet of tape at 15IPS. No matter how quickly or slowly you play it, you could tie one end to the balcony railing of a 42nd floor apartment and the reel would still be unwinding when it hits the sidewalk below. And that's A Day In The Life, not something crazy long!

Now you add video recording with high-velocity spinning video heads to tape with flaky backing, and you're going to have a real problem playing this media down the road. You need the machine, stable tape, and someone who actually knows how to do it.

With commercial video formats far before VHS, there aren't many people alive who know how to maintain and run an Ampex Quad machine, for example. And with that, it's the end of countless hours of video recordings since the dawn of VTRs in the 1950s - Dr. Who, Coronation Street, WKRP. Life-altering news events, triumphs and tragedies. This is akin to losing our literary history because no one knows how to read.

Yeah. This could easily result in more deaths than World War II. Don't be flippant about this. This is the biggest crisis since then.

I am in a high-risk population for bad complications to this disease, and probably a great many Slashdotters are. Come on, we don't generally lead the healthiest lifestyles.

Give me one of those stickers now. I'll take my chances. Someone's got to be the test pilot for every new fighter jet design, right?

Okay; not guaranteed to work yet, I get it. But already scalable to mass production, unrefrigerated transportation in the form of a flat sticker in the mail, and basically a "Place on clean hairless skin anywhere on your body. Leave sticker on until it falls off." is a hell of a lot faster/cheaper/safer and with more population compliance than an injection campaign. Even if it only protects 25% of patients, it's already a game-changer in herd immunity or herd isolation. So what are the chances that this is safe on humans?

If it's safe on humans, then yeah, I'll be a guinea pig for a study. Just don't give me the placebo. :)

Yup.

The car doesn't need to know or care whether it's a cat or a dog running across the road, only that it should avoid hitting it. Things become more difficult when it's a black cat or a pothole - which is it? Easy enough for a human to decide, hard as hell for a computer.

Now, is that a plastic bag blowing in the wind, or is that a toddler running across the road? Does your computer make a decision to cause an accident with another car (and its relatively-well protected occupants) to avoid hitting a plastic bag that could have looked like a child running across the street?

These are HUGE issues in autonomous vehicle design, and there are no easy answers.

Just look at the Ford Pinto gas tank fiasco. In reality, the car was every bit as safe as other hatchbacks at the time. Toyota, whose manufacturing is above reproach, somehow shipped over 200,000 Corollas missing something as seemingly obvious as a speaker - what if it had been a little safety clip in the brakes or front suspension? In 1970s Honda Civics, the passenger could apply the brakes just by pushing too hard on the floor. That didn't make the news because it didn't have leaked internal memos which costed out the deaths and the payouts. This was a central theme in the great 1999 movie Fight Club, and the unnamed protagonist's eventual inability to reconcile what he was seeing with the tradeoffs engineers have to make in their line of work.

I could build you the safest car on the planet. But it would cost you $500,000, would be ugly as sin, would get 5 miles to the gallon on a good day with a nice tailwind, and I wouldn't make money to use for research and innovation and shareholder profit on it. And, most importantly, no one would want it in their driveway.

Risk is a consequence of doing anything. And Engineering is a profession of balancing design constraints to achieve a good outcome.

...never drives drunk... never has a sneezing fit... never has a seizure...

These things are literally two separate and identical computers which decide together what to do. And I'll bet money that when the SpaceX Dragon capsules have docked autonomously with the International Space Station, the computers controlling the Dragon weren't all that different from what's inside every Tesla Autopilot system. Different software and firmware for sure, but I'd bet there'll be Tesla logos on those circuit boards in a few places.

Tesla and SpaceX are not automotive and aerospace companies. They're computer companies which specialize in a ground-up approach to applying high-reliability real-time systems to old problems.

And that's it. A car accident doesn't make the news unless it's spectacularly tragic. If an autonomous car takes out a stop sign to avoid a gopher, it's news.

I don't think the autonomous technology is ready for the road yet, certainly not here in Ottawa, Canada, with our climate. But yeah, it's coming, and it will soon be safer per kilometer than any human driver.

At least you understand the Dunning-Kruger effect. You are therefore already a better driver than the vast majority of the people on the road.

Yup.

Getting to space is incredibly difficult. There are going to be failures. And yes, humans will continue to die. But Elon is on the right track. He's learning manufacturing and machining from Tesla, and taking those lessons - and Tesla Model 3 motors - to SpaceX. He's bringing SpaceX computers and system engineering like the classic inverted pendulum problem (which is a rocket propulsively landing) and reliability to Tesla Autopilot.

The guy has his fingers in too many pies? No... He has his fingers in all the right pies to meet his goals.

Look at my username. I love cars, I love horsepower, I love knowing I can smoke the tires off the thing any time I want. It's not so different from someone who wants the fastest computer in the store.. and then overclocks and water-cools it. I've driven some seriously powerful musclecars over the years - Buick Grand National GNX, Ferrari and Lamborghini "supercars", Dodge Vipers, every engine Chrysler stuffed into a car from 1960 to 1990 including a 426 Hemi A-body. (No, I didn't get to drive a Chrysler Turbine - but I have seen one running, and I can tell you that it sounds like a vacuum cleaner when it's idling.) I've stuffed a Buick 231 (3.8L, the "3800") V6 into a Chevette and really was scared of what I had built. My fingers are calloused from welding burns and soldering burns so much that people think I'm either a pothead or a guitarist. So I'm not your typical "Yo, I had it tuned!" fan of the Fast and the Furious crap.

I was doubtful at first and then I got behind the wheel of a Tesla Model 3. Uh.... all I can say is holy shit.

When you get right down to it, an electric car is just a cordless drill on four wheels. That's all it is. The Model 3 is an eerily-silent machine which can outperform almost any vintage American musclecar on the 1/4 mile. And it does it as a 4-door sedan with a huge curb weight (batteries, inefficient body design, weirdness in control arms); in that way, it takes you by surprise the way a Buick Grand National's V6 and heavy body-on-frame does. And it *handles*, the low center of gravity makes it feel stable and the weight distribution is centered right under the passenger compartment so your inner ear feels what the rest of the car is feeling in a way that isn't possible with a 700lb chunk of iron up front. I am sold. The only limitation to Tesla's cars are range (especially in cold climates) and recharge times (especially on long trips). But the Model 3 would probably be a fun (!) upgrade for about 90% of sedan buyers.

Jay Leno is a *huge* car guy, and I like Jay Leno's Garage on YouTube far more than I ever liked his late night show. Jay Leno is not easily impressed by a powerful car, considering he personally owns and drives some of the most powerful cars ever made.

This is Jay Leno's reaction to the 2020 Tesla Roadster prototype.

Sandy Munro is an expert in automotive manufacturing. You'll see he's a salty no-bullshit guy from Detroit, and he really isn't impressed by Tesla's overall body quality. He loves the Superbottle under the hood of every Model 3 as an amazing example of the integration and ingenuity that conventional car companies simply cannot do because of their organizational structure. He loves the pride that the Tesla engineers took in the idea, showing it off with the Superbottle mascot. As for drivetrain, motor, electronics, batteries, he is clearly very impressed by Tesla cars. The tin can on the outside is mediocre; everything else about the Model S and the Model 3 he has torn apart and studied are 6-8 years ahead of any other electric car.

This TV show is a Detroit public TV show about the automotive industry. Sponsors advertise automotive assembly line machine tools to the engineers watching. Sandy Munro is very impressed by Tesla. Here he's talking about the Cybertruck. This is the furthest thing from a Tesla fan-boy video. Sandy Munro is not a man who is easily impressed by a car. He's said many times that all other car companies should be very worried.

Ten years from now, Elon Musk might be mass-producing rockets as reliably as a Tesla Model 3. The paint might not be up to Toyota's quality, but the Model 3 already blows away any Camry or Corolla ever made, and does so at what Sandy estimates to be a better profit margin per car - as much as it surprised him: (Autoline Tesla Model 3 Teardown).

I believe Elon Musk might be the Nikola Tesla of our age, endowed with Edison and Ford's business sense, and a wonderful sense of the absurd to market himself.

As a piece of art in space, that's his former personal car, he's beckoning us to join his dream of space travel being as pleasant as driving a cherry red convertible.

That's a pretty amazing dream and goal and if there's a living human being capable of achieving it, it's Elon Musk.

His rockets have solved the inverted pendulum problem and usually land as perfectly as a good truck driver backing into a loading dock. The damned things should have back-up beepers. And they're getting better all the time.

Elon Musk has a Slashdot account. I would bet money on it. And I would bet he reads and comments at least occasionally.

Elon, as a tribute to those who have died and who will die while we get the new coronavirus under control, as a tribute to all those who have died in previous plagues and a reminder of why we need to spread our wings further than convenient jet travel, as a tribute to the great author Stephen King, and as a beacon of hope to the world, I ask you to bless your first human transport ship to Mars with the name "Mother Abigail".

I trust in her mighty pluck and resilience and fortitude and goodness and safety.