None of the major parties are trying to throw out the software wholesale. They are merely trying to verify that the software is mathematically and logically correct. It's more like "a few people have had adverse reactions, so let's check the trial data" Individuals have a right to face their accusers, and examine the evidence and arguments they present, whether it be a human or software accuser.

There's a tremendous amount of concern that the hardware they are installing now (HW3 or something I think, since HW1 was MobileEye, HW2 was Nvidia working with Tesla IIRC, and HW3 is their own in house chips), will just like HW1 and HW2, turn out to be insufficient in the end, or that the sensor design is insufficient, thus needing a retrofit anyways. They'll need to retrofit a bunch of cars as it stands, and by the time they actually have Autopilot working, the price of a 10 Tfp processor will have fallen. Meanwhile, what do they really need for a good driving experience? Smooth maps, high quality audio, and passenger video, maybe. But in my mind, the extra things, like media controls, passenger video playback, and mapping should not be running on the same processor or system as steering and speed inputs.

Then again, Tesla is also the company that has an advisory for them to recall thousands of cars because they used too small of a flash chip, and wrote too many logs to it. And only admitted it was a design defect after several people brought attention to it and the repair cost of replacing the MCU. But at least they are better than GM, who argued for cars in warranty, that design defects were not covered under the warranty, as they were neither material nor worksmanship.

Laser, rail-gun, Rolling Air-frame Missile salvo, 20mm CIWS, 30mm Goalkeeper? I mean, it's not like hypersonic missiles have much in the way of structural redundancy. They can't, unless seriously oversized in fuel loads. A glancing hit at any point, or even a medium disruption of the air-stream would be sufficient to tear the vehicle to bits, and once structural failure occurred, the drag on the now far less streamlined shrapnel and debris would greatly reduce the velocity. At that point, any warhead would be useless, either having failed with the vehicle, or now slowing rapidly before the target.

I mean, many of the process controls and machinery run on 400+v. The primary need would be to ensure that the vehicle was built to the same inherently safe/explosion proof standards as the process equipment. Which is to say that all terminals and contacts would be sealed, as would the motors and anything else capable of generating a spark or above a certain max temperature, and that conductors must be sufficiently insulated and armored to protect against reasonable levels of wear or damage.

Explosion proof electronic devices are not rare. NEMA has ratings for those, my cell phone is certified for use in hazardous atmospheres as well, so it isn't just something that can only be done with static and massive equipment.

That's entirely incorrect. From the reference frame of one car, the relatively velocity of the other is 140 MPH. The major differences are that head on collisions have no fixed foundation (IE, both are able to rebound independently), and that the crumple zones (and thus room for deceleration) are doubled. There is NO absolute frame of reference, the only things at issue are relative velocity. If you hit a car head on at 140 MPH, that is identical to two cars driving at each other at 70MPH relative to the ground. What matters to the collision energy is the relative velocity of an object from the frame of what it is colliding with, and the masses of both. A pole, with attendant foundation, is quite massive, and has relatively poor deformation properties, when compared against a modern sedan. That is why a head on collision with another vehicle is less damaging than a pole, not because of some imagined difference between relative velocity and your imagined absolute velocity.

Firstly, they can't scale because the equipment is only so big, can only move so many packages, and all the people who would build it, as well as all the assembly and project teams are facing major travel restrictions. Amazon is currently at effectively peak capacity, has held there for two and a half months, and any projects in the pipeline for new greenfield capacity are delayed if not cancelled. No matter how much undeserved scorn you have for the people on the warehouse floor, or the folks managing them, it won't change the fundamental reality: Everyone is ordering everything. Each week is another Black Friday rush. And rather than toys and small compact things, it's paper towels, detergent, liquids, fabrics. All things that don't play nice with conveyor belts, and quick package handling.

Secondly, your other assumption might be right. The human component of stuffing a package might be 5 minutes, as they take an item from a bin on a robotically retrieved shelf, place it on a tray scanned to the item, and then the tray goes to another station where it is scanned to a slot in a storage wall, and then the next person on the other side scans the items to a tote for the order, and then the tote goes to another person who actually packs it in a box, then the box goes to a truck to be loaded by a person.
Then the truck goes to a sort center. At the sort center, it might just go on a conveyor to an automated scanner/sorter, and back down into another truck. But more likely, they then go to people to have pallets built, then the pallets are grouped by destination, then loaded to yet another truck, and if you're lucky, the pallets at that point go to distribution centers, or local carriers. Otherwise, it's off to the next sort center to repeat the process.
Multiply this by the millions, and realize that there is an actual work flow, and a heck of a lot of equipment to train people on, and you might start to understand, if you can wrap your mind around the concepts, that if they are scrambling to change staffing to accomodate social distancing, having to deal with every optimized floor plan and flow breaking down at the vast changes in purchasing, shipping, and consumption, all while training a massive horde of out of work waiters and other people to work with conveyor belts, barcode scanners, pallet jacks, and massive pieces of almost automated material handling equipment, they may be understandably delayed in delivering the things they regard as less critical.

I doubt custom body work will be easy to do on the Tesla truck. It is a monocoque design, with the body being the structure. Duplicating that strength with aftermarket body work will be quite difficult, while tying a frame to reinforce lighter gauge body work into the rest of the body will also be difficult.

Beyond that, you may also face difficulty accessing the underside of the bed to mount a fifth wheel or gooseneck hitch, as I'm betting Tesla did the sensible thing and actually used the space under the bed for the battery, as well as the rear wheel drive units, which makes the weight distribution much better than traditional trucks, but also means that unless Tesla engineered mounts and accounted for them in the design and didn't mention them or show them, it will be much more difficult to fit the mounts in space wise, and it will definitely be more difficult than bolting the underside frame to the frame rails, which often already have tapped holes for factory options in many trucks.

The problem I see with your assertions is that they are not supported by science. Nuclear waste is currently a problem, partially due to the fact that we have banned reprocessing.

Nuclear material is always radioactive, true. So are Bananas. The dose matters greatly. Highly radioactive material has a short life span. Some of it is as low as a few fractions of a second, others a week or two. Those materials will rapidly decay to less emissive forms. That's because the radiation is the loss of energy from the decay events. The overall decay chains may last quite some time, but if we separate out the highly active material from the lower activity, long lasting ones, we should see the radioactivity reduced quickly, as we won't have a bunch of nice heavy, semi-stable atoms around for chain reactions.

At that point, we have a large pile of long lasting, low level waste, and a much smaller pile of extremely dangerous high level waste that will burn itself out much faster. At which point, we can put some/much of the high level waste into other reactor types, such as MOX or pebble-bed reactors. Or use it for radiothermal generators. That low level waste can either be buried relatively safely, or can be re-enriched to use again as fuel. After all, the Uranium was in the ground at one point, and with careful work, we can put it in sufficiently stable containers that once they do break down, the risk is relatively low.

However, the reprocessing is socially problematic. It creates isotopes suitable for military use, involves a facility that will be be a major radioactive hazard should someone need to enter some sections, should something go wrong, is currently banned in the US, and would require moving waste from power plants where it is currently stored to the reprocessing facility, or else building a lot of these facilities, which would be quite expensive.

You can mitigate some of those concerns, by doing things like flooding the facility during emergency work (as water, with it's high hydrogen weight, is really great at dissipating radation), building a handful of these facilities on campus's with existing reactors, and clustering additional construction of reactors around them.

Ah, so Japan has massive dry forests, through which hundreds of lines of transmission lines are strung?

Perhaps the reason Japan doesn't have the same fire problems is that it has a much older history of population, and thus the forests there don't have the same level of old-growth wood, and they also haven't had a devastating drought hit those forests and the cities around them. Not to mention that California has had a population boom since a large number of those power lines were designed, and while capacity upgrades have been made, choices in routing suitable for, say, a singular 200KV line may not be optimal now that 800KV lines are possible. Meanwhile, Japan has been experiencing a population decline for decades now.

This problem is a lot more complicated than a surface level look would indicate.
You've got expansion of both loads and generation sites, including intermittent ones that then need more complicated switch gear, as solar installations mostly are on distribution circuits designed only for loads, as well as residential systems that aren't equally powering all phases of a circuit. That's a major technical problem, even ignoring the management and regulatory issues PG&E had.

Then add on the California droughts, and the massive amount of dead brush that resulted. Now even small sparks that would be harmless in say, Seattle, spark a massive wildfire. Plus the high temperatures that would raise the operating temperatures of the equipment further. That's an environmental issue. It isn't just PG&E driving that, it's global climates, as well as the massive population and general water use in California.

Compound that with the engagement and regulatory structure. Companies exist to make money. Utility regulators exist to keep them from making too much, at the expense of their customers. Any time a utility asks for a rate increase, for say, upgrades, the regulator gives it a close look if they care about doing their jobs. After all, at least in my area, the allowed profit is relative to the capital investments made, and allowing additional capital spend for upgrades, and the attendant rate increases, means more absolute cash that can be paid to investors. So regulators actually have an incentive to prevent upgrades, if they believe they are unneeded.

And just like that, you have a recipe where people are mostly doing their jobs properly, just not perfectly, and the evolution of risk factors screws a whole bunch of people, because plans with a 20+ year implementation time didn't properly account for the changes in the operation conditions.

Yes, because they were headed for a population crash, where the working generations would be substantially smaller than the generations it was replacing. Additionally, while the official policy was rescinded, the cultural impacts will still be felt for generations, and the skewing of gender birth rates can also impact population growth, as men outnumber women 118 to 100 at birth, meaning that population growth could not be as rapid per capita, as while men are important in reproduction, they do not do the majority of the work, nor are they the rate limiting factor.

China will start seeing it's population reduce in size. Depending on cultural factors, they may continue to decline in population, even if they hit replacement birth rates for the latest generations, due to the size of those generations being substantially smaller than those before them. They may accelerate the decline, should they like many industrialized nations, end up settling at a birth rate that is slightly below the replacement rate over the long term (See Germany, Japan). They may rebound and either stabilize, or begin growing again, if culturally they end up convinced to exceed the replacement rate, which would be best for China's economy (contraction of the demand and labor pools are typically bad for markets), while being worst for the environment.

However, we also need to watch India, Africa, and the middle-east, as those regions have large growth potential. Should India get sanitation and infant mortality under control, their population will grow even faster (until the normal cultural reductions in birth rate occur, if they do). Should Africa or the middle-east get their various armed conflicts under control, and stop losing so many men, women, and children to warfare, they may very well see population booms due to that, as well as likely seeing some increase in reproduction due to the increased wealth from no longer diverting resources to destruction.

And that's not a case of "I respond only to urgent matters", unless of course, said powerpoint is a presentation to either a regulator agency or major investors, and the normal presenter is out of commission. Urgent are threats to imminent threats to life, limb, continuity of business, or jail time. If the FBI is running amuck in the office, and grabbing computers, any IT tech you can get in should be there to document what they take and the condition, as well as secure copies of any backups. If there's flooding working it's way to a 3 phase panel, the closest electrician you can call should come in the make sure it's safely taken down. Ideally, these folks are already on site, but shit happens.

Yes. A phone or camera vendor has a finite number of variations, usually related to various regions a model might be released in. A car manufacturer, other than Tesla, will build the same trim of car to the same design for pretty much an entire year. It simplifies service, since these are durable goods that cannot just be replaced. How the parts get put together or made may change. But they may start out with different factories doing it different ways due to different floor plans, and not change for the year.

Kanban is about largely optimizing the process, not changing the product. That's something that AniMoJo got wrong. But you proved you don't understand it either with your response. You optimize stock, tools, ordering time, assembly order, packaging, machining strategies, etc. But the print you build the part to should not change.

You also seem to have a strong interest in saying that anyone criticizing Agile is wrong, while saying anyone who listens to clients or adapts to changing circumstances is essentially doing Agile. If that's Agile, then of course it will only result in success, since you've disqualified all failures, and most people don't actually need to pay any attention to Agile coaches or manifestos, since basic common sense and customer service handle the most important parts of it.

There's something similar in the US. Retail electrical prices are regulated, and are kept at a limited profit margin based on investment and costs. Wholesale prices include a large number of generators, transmission operators, etc, and are constantly moving. Now, to protect the consumer from these rapidly fluctuating prices, and to allow the grid to be paid for, most residential and commercial customers are on fixed rate or time of use metering. Some kilowatts you get are much more expensive that what you pay, while others the utility is paid to take. Industrial customers will often enough purchase at wholesale or arrange other contracts (see Apple buying all renewable energy for it's operations)

However, that is plug limited, and requires more maintenance. I'm no Tesla fanboy, but a whole home battery is worth 1500-1800, even for short run times, so long as it also deals with low voltage events (brownouts). I spend probably 60$ a year maintaining a trio of UPS's that size (replacing one set of batteries per year, doesn't include potential waste charges for SLA batteries), which only handles network gear and a pair of desktops.

So, presuming that it lasts the ten years of a powerwall warranty, I'm looking at 180$ a year, if I spread the cost out. Compared to the three Trip-lite units I have, at a purchase price of call it 200$ each (600$ total, which is around what I spend, since I bought two on sale and was given the third when someone moved), I have 120$ per year in costs. That starts looking much more attractive. Add in that many people will also get their load centers modernized, which can save a lot of cash, plus the maintenance is somebody else's problem. That's quite nice.

Maybe because gamers are budget constrained. If I have 300$, I can't buy a 500$ card that will run my games the way I want, since the original 300$ MSRP is inflated due to demand. Because I can't buy that card in the first place, I can't mine with it. Or, I happen to not live in one of the areas where the power costs make that break even. Perhaps my computer can't be left on at night because the fans/lights keep me awake.

I don't like miners because they are mostly wasting a shit-load of electricity, stealing CPU cycles, or hardware, driving up prices of anything with graphics hardware (GDDR and generic DRAM shortages), and functioning as essentially a high-tech form of scrip, or perhaps monopoly money, with little to nothing backing it (See the open question about if tether actually has the cash to back their tokens that they claim to, since they printed a few hundred million since declaring their bank transfers in and out had been blocked, or perhaps any of the other scams, like Bitconnect, or Pincoin). The vast majority of the "Value" of these currencies is in coins that have never been traded for cash, many of which are out of circulation. Thus the fantastic value numbers are more representative of the last few dozen coins trading price multiplied by the total sum of coins. Logically, because the exchanges never took in sums in the billions of dollars, they can't pay it out. So it's all an illusion of worth, even more so than fiat currency or a standard bank account, because you can't pay nearly as many vendors with it, so it's utility is less, especially since most people don't understand that they are pseudonymous systems, rather than complete anonymous setups. Even the big names in privacy, like Monero, have had it breached. Most are less private than a credit card, because those at least are bound not to release all your info to anyone who calls to ask.