I wonder, given the amount of say jet fuel used worldwide - will this process scale?

Thanks for the correction. Regardless, 6 minutes isn't much to get excited about.

Yes, I read the story. Perhaps I was underwhelmed, why you decided to get insulting about it is another thing. Here we go

Wow! 6 minutes! Looks like we'll be having that safe unlimited and no radioactive waste fusion power next week - the last of the hurdles has been cleared. Only 240 tungsten chamber changes each day. The prophecy of electricity too cheap to measure has been acheived. Take that non believers! /s

Do you understand that 6 minutes after many decades of work isn't much of a breakthrough? It isn't.

Miss me the that stuff. Call me when they reach a Qtot of 1, and run the capsule for say 24 hours. Then I'll say they've made a breakthrough.

I see them riding in illegal fashion every day. Several abreast. Wrong side of the road. Stop sigh and traffic light violations, passing on the right just because there is a little space. And a surprising number of DUI's. I was just curious so I DDG'd arrested for riding bike on a freeway. Definitely illegal and dangerous. And here he is! He thought it was a good idea to ride his bike on an expressway. https://6abc.com/philadelphia-...

Yeah, anger management chap or chapette sounds exactly like the guy who I was riding behind as a chase/sag vehicle that was giving me shit and tried to kick my car door in. By the way, in case Anger management guy is reading, I was following 50 feet behind, well within the proper following distance for riders going 20 MPH at best. A quick radio call to headquarters, and he was removed from the race and suspended for some amount of time. Who knows - it might be the same idjit.

I'd like everyone to obey the traffic laws, not just the cars. And the fault rate for car/bike crashes is what we would expect, around half each way.

You are absolutely right. Be nice to him though, I don't think he knows what words mean..

And somone posted back to me that bicyclists can do what they do. because motorists.

Hey rude person - people are supposed to obey the traffic laws because terrible things can happen if they don't. If that triggers you, that is a you problem.

And your non sequitur that since motorists do't always follow the laws, that it's okay for bikers to not is whataboutism of the lamest sort.

But wait - there's more!

Saturday curb stomping time. Haven't done that for a while, consider yourself gifted with one.

Oh dear, I have made you angry, Good! Fresh meat. Although it appears it doesn't take much to get you wrapped around the proverbial axle. I do so enjoy making the congenitally angry even angrier. You represent the worst of the street bikers I've met. Brittle, quick to anger, and not all that logical. That you choose to throw a bit of a snit of a shitfit because I said that the road laws should be obeyed by everyone, just illustrates that you might consider some counseling for your anger issues.

What is more, before you tell me to go post on my local facebook group, that would be strange. All my "local facebook groups are technicall oriented, not where bicyclists try to claim they have no obligations to operate legally.

But alas, we gonna reference your exceptionally non- sequitur comment about the "mentality of a 12 year old" Since that came out of the blue, completely unrelated to anything I posted, we'll address that.

I'm just curious, how much time do you spend thinking about 12 year olds? Don't bring it up to your therapist, because your therapist is required to report that sort of thing to the pertinent authorities.

You are quite the amusing chap or chappette. Is your metric that the law is not to be obeyed unless a car hits a bike? Explain if it is at all possible. You don't even have to use the big words. I'll illustrate a response you might make. "Car BAD! Bike GOOD!" Can you do that maybe? Come on, I know you can. You can do the thing!

Triggered chap or chapette, you need to take up your self certified truth with some other people https://www.npr.org/sections/h... There ya go, make clicky clicky, and the magic of the intertoobz will take you to some other places where you can set those others straight with your weird and lame insults.

The stats would appear to show that fault is fairly evenly distributed, not your "vast majority" are cars. Your personal analysis is half-vast.

A roughly even fault rate makes good sense, because that's to be expected. By people who are logical and can think.

Now give mommy and daddy back their computer, because I've come to the conclusion that no special needs person would post like you did, even with brittle anger issues and childish insults. And you're a really smart person who is always right, yesno?

Where I'm at bicyclists are regularly fined for blowing through stop signs and traffic lights, even for drunken driving. It's been a while, but I think I remember a guy getting cited for driving too fast for condidtions or somesuch for trying to bike during a snowstorm, and creating a traffic hazard. I dunno where the guy who believes they aren't constrained at all is posting from, but I'd like to know.

Depends on how significant your internal heat sources are (e.g. computers waiting to fire up the engines). And if you're transporting people on the same flight as the frozen food, remember that people are a rather significant internal heat source. :-)

Those exceptions are simple - Bikes are not allowed on freeways.

If wherever you are has no rules for bicycles, good luck.

That the drivers that you don't like can be a pain - I take it from your post that you excuse the bikers habits? I'm sure you don't. Personally, I am for everyone obeying traffic rules. I obey them, I give all bicycles at least 4 feet which is the law. I even drive off the opposite side when they decide to ride four abreast. I see many legal infractions every day of my life.

The thing that interests me is the difference between off road biking and road biking. I help at race events giving communications and rider locations. The gravel and mountain bike racers go out of their way to thank me for the help, while the road racers tend toward rudeness. Caution, swearing by other people follows.

My best example (not the only one) is one road race where my job was to follow behind the last person on the course to keep HQ informed, and at the end is where people with bike or injury problems tend to end up, so I can call for a sag or an ambulance. That sets the scene.

So I'm following the last few riders. Things are going okay. Then the guy at the end drops back toward me. "What the fuck are you doing? Fucking pass us asshole!"

Me - "I'm with the race people, I'm following the tail end to make sure everyone's safe"

"Bullshit, pass us you stupid fucker!"

Then he went to kick in my door panel - fortunately, I swerved and he missed. He then cycled on.

A quick radio call to HQ, which was the next aid station, and giving them his number, they told me they'd take care of it. He was removed from the race and given a suspension, I think for a year.

While I'm at it, at another race I was helping with, I was paired with a young woman who was an absolute delight. Friendly, good sense of humor. We hit it right off. Looked like it was going to be a good day. Wrong.

The woman managing the race turned out to be a nightmare. I took a picture of the racers as they set off and I was going to my station. Manager started yelling at me. Okay, maybe she's just having a bad morning. So my lady friend and I took off to where I was supposed to be.

We got to the place marked on the map, and it was definitely wrong. So I called into HQ, and they put the manager on the phone. She starts swearing at me, telling me I was incompetent, then saying she'd come out and show me since I couldn't figure out by myself.

The woman with me sat there absorbing all this. I told her that being professional, I had to absorb the abuse. She chuckled.

The woman in charge stopped where we were, and continued to heap the abuse on me. "Why the fuck did you stop here? This obviously isn't the right place!"

I showed her the map with the explicit instructions. They were wrong. "Oh" Then the manager escorted us to the proper station.

My station partner then unloaded on the race manager. I'll spare the details, but aside from saying the race didn't deserve either of us, asking how many other mistakes "your highness made" and calling her completely incompetent, rude, and letting her know that she was going to report her to her official contacts, because the manager was a hazard to safety, and she continued to upbraid the manager for at least 5 minutes. Didn't swear once. Which made it even better. Turned out my lady friend was higher in racing hierarchy then the rude and crude manager.

Manager left with her tail between her legs, didn't even apologize to me. But my station partner and I were kinda giggly the rest of the day. I told her I never wanted to piss her off, and she told me - "Well, I am Irish you know. And you might have been constrained by your restraints, but I'm not."

Interesting, but that bike race was canceled after that year.

It's also illegal to crack into someone's system even if the root password is "root". It's still a terrible idea to set your root password to "root" and enable remote root logins. If you design a system in a way that is fundamentally insecure, you should always assume that someone will come along and abuse it.

Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it won't be done, nor does it mean that the police will have the technical capability to figure out who did it, particularly if its operation is delayed beyond the retention period of traffic camera footage.

And it need not even be malicious. A cyclist riding over a bridge that crosses above a freeway could cause panic braking at high speed. Are you going to make it illegal for cyclists to ride over freeway bridges?

Agreed. All of these ideas that folks come up with where cars are supposed to trust external signals that they can't verify are fundamentally flawed by design. Cyclists should not be blindly riding across roads without looking to see if a car is coming. That's what stop signs and traffic lights are for. And although it would be nice to reduce the odds of cyclists dying when they make reckless mistakes, it isn't worth having the traffic grid constantly being brought to a halt by threat actors.

Cars should trust what they see and can detect by vision or other similar mechanisms, period. There is very little point to having any additional information, because no external data can be considered trustworthy.

For things *far* beyond what they can see, e.g. navigation decisions, trusting external sources (map data, traffic data) is unavoidable, of course, but bad map data or traffic data is unlikely to be a safety issue as long as the car doesn't trust it for safety-critical decisions (deciding when, precisely, to steer, etc.).

But for things that they should be able to see, trusting external data over what their internal sensors can detect creates the potential for causing the cars to make safety-critical decisions that are wrong, which can actually diminish safety.

The example of a cyclist 300 feet ahead, just over the next rise, is rather nonsensical. If the cyclist is moving in the correct direction, there's never a problem, and even if the cyclist had a wreck and is stopped over the next rise, you should see the cyclist in time to stop. If not, unless the cyclist is riding the wrong direction, chances are either the driver is going too fast or the road's speed limit is high enough that cyclists should not be allowed on the road. I doubt the number of times that this happens in a year without one of those three contributing factors is a very high number. I suppose collisions between cars pulling out of driveways with limited sidewalk visibility would be the exception, but I think those also are more likely to be injuries rather than fatalities.

Assuming camera-based and/or LIDAR-based detection of bicycles that are actually visible is working properly, that vehicles properly creep out to see past obstructions, and that cars are driving the speed limit, the only way this can realistically prevent a large number of accidents would be in situations where the cyclist does something incredibly stupid, like crossing a road without stopping at a traffic light or stop sign to verify that it is safe to cross. That isn't the cause of very many cyclist accidents, because most cyclists aren't complete idiots.

But the potential for this technology to cause serious accidents is much, much larger. Think about someone putting a transmitter on the underside of a 70 MPH freeway bridge, for example. The map system says that two roads cross, so it is at least plausibly a spot where a cyclist could be in the path of traffic. So now you have cars panic-braking at 70 MPH for a cyclist that doesn't exist, causing wreck after wreck after wreck in the same spot day after day.

Not to mention that if they aren't relying on vision for detection, cars aren't likely to know that the cyclist is too far above them vertically to plausibly ever cross their path, so every time a cyclist rides across a freeway bridge, they're going to cause a traffic jam. I mean, they haven't even solved the problem of radar return from bridges yet, and that's a much easier problem to solve (because of increased data) than the "is the cyclist on a bridge" problem.

And if you turn that feature off on the freeway to avoid those problems, you're likely to also cause it to not work at freeway exit ramps, which is one of the few spots where otherwise cautious cyclists might plausibly be saved by the system.

No, this idea seems like pretty much all downside to me, with no real upside, practically speaking. For every one life it saves, it could easily kill a hundred.

Indeed, here in PA, cyclists are bound by the same rules as other vehicles. You are correct that many riders do not like that. When roads get repaved, we almost always put in bike lanes, sometimes having to do eminent domain on everyone living along the road - which doesn't please hundreds of people. We have a law that we must give bicyclists a minimum of 4 feet (or about 1.3 meters) space between them and a driver. But when they ride abreast (illegal) You have to do off the road to the side to avoid breaking the law. Indeed crossing the center line can get you cited for reckless driving.

Do stop signs change color in your country? 8^) Because that's what I was referring to - stop signs

The problem is that when a bike blows through a stop sign, and they get hit, at least in our city, the police get to go to the hospital to give them their citation.

Yes cars sometimes drift or not come to a full stop. If they simply blow through a sign without slowing down, that's bad. But I see nowhere near the number of bikes I've seen on a daily basis. Like most of them. And the mass differential tells us the person on the bicycle almost never wins. One of the big impact issues is the bike runs into the side of the car, and the bicyclist gets launched over the top of the car. It will either be minor, or worse if the rider lands in the path of another vehicle that can't stop in time.

Battery electric vehicles have a 0.025% chance of catching fire, compared to 1.5% for internal combustion engine.

An ICE is 61 times more likely to catch on fire than an EV.

EV vs ICE fire statistics