I agree with you about the distraction and do want to see more buttons/sliders/knobs instead of touchscreen menus.
However, I don't removing the display will actually improve reliability that much. Those buttons, sliders, are going to talk to the car's control system, probably not be directly wired to what they're controlling. The CPU is a major point of failure and it's going to be hard to source particular models in the future.
The earthquake also cracked the spent fuel cooling pools that were located on top of the reactors. Those were leaking and a real fear at the time (I was living in Tokyo when it happened) was that if the pools emptied the spent fuel would self-ignite and we'd get a nice cloud of radioactive dust floating towards Tokyo.
The biggest thing that wasn't handled in the disaster planning was that not only was the nuclear power plant damaged, but all of the surrounding infrastructure was destroyed and a national scale disaster around the plant was happening. Japan had just gone through a massive earthquake, upwards of 20,000 people were reported dead early on and the problems at Fukushima were not the primary concern the first few days after the earthquake. The scenario for dealing with failed diesel generators would have been to truck in new generators which could have been handled before the reactors melted down in normal circumstances except it was impossible to get to the plant. The "Heavy Rescue" unit from the Tokyo fire department headed to Fukushima to help. It took them three days to get there because the roads were blocked in so many places. TEPCO was in "everything's fine, it's OK, it's OK" mode and the Japanese political level of the government was the Democratic Party of Japan who had not held power in decades and none of the political level people knew how to manage a disaster and it showed.
By the time Fukushima started receiving the kind of national level attention that it warranted the reactors were in meltdown.
3. Many Japanese families own no car, and there is integrated public transportation at both the departure and destination. Few Californians will take the train to LA because they won't have a car when they get there.
I went from SF to LA in August. We flew and rented a car. HSR stations will need car rental to work, but that's a solved problem.
RTGs (Radioisotope Thermal Generators) don't put out that much power - a few hundred watts at most. An actual fission reactor will produce a lot more.
A Tesla Model uses about 358 Watt Hours/mile. A 1KWh pack weighs about 24 pounds (10 kilos), thatâ(TM)s good for about 3 miles. Definitely heavier than the amount of gas you would need for the same distance, but 2-3 miles is about as far as you would want to walk anyhow.
I learned to code in middle school, on an actual ASR 33 teletype back in the 70's, mainly teaching myself from books because the teachers didn't get it. By the time I was in high school I was training teachers on how to use computers and we never got to teaching them coding (BASIC, baby, the language of the future!). My kids are in high school now and when I went to the orientation, the vice principal in charge of online registration, who looks to be in his thirties maybe, told us that he "wasn't good with computers" and couldn't get everything to work.
Back when I was in high school, I thought the teachers didn't get it because they'd never been exposed. No one has that excuse any more. It's truly lack of aptitude and interest. If you think you are going to get an assortment of humanities majors to learn how to problem solve and teach coding to students you have another thing coming.
Well, the guys who tied onions to their belt laugh at the kids with their toy projects exclaiming "language X is the greatest thing ever". One criticism of Java I saw was that "you need to read a book to understand it" - I laughed all afternoon. Your facial recognition example is classic - you called a library in three lines. I could do the same thing in Java or C with a few more lines of code. If I want to bang something out that works this afternoon, Python is a great choice. Now, go write that facial recognition library. Python is not going to be your first choice.
Your joke was only funny in your mom's basement
No longer true. PV payback is estimated at 4 years or less with 25 year useful lifespan.
I think your numbers are off. Benban is rated at 1.8 Gw, so assuming it produces power 12 hours a day, that comes out to 7.8 Twh/year. Generated total power, world wide, was around 20,000 Twh in 2013, 40% of that is from coal, so 8000 Twh produced from coal, or 1025 Benban sized plants needed to replace, coming out to 38000 sq km or an area 200 km on a side and about $4T to replace the coal plants. That doesn't include storage which would also be needed, that might double the price.
It's not the removal that's the problem. They're out steam cleaning the streets regularly. It's that they're not dealing with the shit being put on the streets. I grew up in SF and I never saw a person shitting on the streets back in the 80's (we had a dog shit problem back then). I was showing a friend around SF the other day and as we driving near Powell St station he asked about the homeless and I said it was a problem and we looked out the window and there was a woman dropping trou. That was not allowed in the past, shouldn't be allowed today.
If I find a scooter in my driveway or on my lawn it's going in the trash.
It's not a myth. Python is slow. You may choose to take that as a trade-off and that's fine.
Supersonic over the Pacific would still be a game changer. My last 17 hour flight to Singapore was way, way too long. Even in business it's just not fun.
He was creating a different, non-infringing implementation. That's different from "independent invention" which means you got the same thing but did it on your own. Examining patents to figure out a different way to do it in a non-infringing matter is standard practice and the defense, if sued by a patent holder, is "this invention doesn't infringe", not "I invented it without looking at yours"
Many people write memos to tell you they have nothing to say.
